Global Indian Alpha: how talent is reshaping venture capital

"We are an early stage tech VC. We like to call ourselves India's first global VC. So we are operators turned investors. Leo started in 2018 by Rajul and myself…. headquartered in Singapore, investing globally in what we call the Global Indian Alpha, which is primarily founders which have either an Indian origin or a desire to build with the India advantage."

"Entrepreneurs who say grew up in India, but then moved to the UK or moved to the US, they were raising primarily from US or UK funds because the Indian funds, it's harder to invest outside…. it's hard to invest in a Delaware C Corp or a London company. So we felt that there was interesting blue ocean there to truly tailor our services to global Indians."

"Our structure to be based in Singapore was thought through for this reason, that it allows you to invest easily in global markets. So we can invest without regulatory approval in the US, in Europe, in Australia, Southeast Asia, wherever…. in India, the rules require you to get approvals if you're investing outside of India and a lot more hoops to jump through."

"The more you do this kind of investing globally, you're working with founders in Germany, you're working with founders in the UK, in the US. You just get more attuned to how to build these cross-cultural plays and that muscle. And if you're only investing in one geography, it's just hard to build that muscle."

"We seeded this company. We were first-check investors, and the company was just a concept. The company has grown to almost $50 million in ARR…. their office is worth going to at about 9 PM India time, because that's morning in the US…. And they've cracked the code on amazing capital efficiency, so almost 1x kind of burn ratio."

"They took inspiration from Paytm and UPI and saw how you can use that in open banking to reduce merchant dependence on card networks…. in UPI, the merchant discount rate is zero. So you can't make money in payments. While in open banking in the UK, you can charge 1.25%…. Lambda was India for the world, built in India, sell to the world. And Atoa is more like learn from an experience of a scale up in India and see how it applies to an advanced market."

"There are funds dedicated to diasporas from Korea, Greece, Cambodia, Portugal. And then you add all of these diasporas up, there's still a fraction of the Indian diaspora…. If you look at unicorns in the US, there are about a thousand unicorns in the US and the country of birth for unicorn founder, the highest is US, second highest is India. So India has 90 unicorn founders, Israel has 45."