Kunal Shah, Aman Gupta, Anupam Mittal peak angel investments in 2022: Tracxn Reports
According to data from startup and private deal intelligence platform Tracxn, Kunal Shah, founder of FinTech unicorn Cred, was India’s most active angel investor in 2022 with 54 bets. He was followed by Aman Gupta, co-founder of wearables brand boAt, and Anupam Mittal, founder of Mumbai-based People Group, the parent company of matrimonial portal Shaadi.com.
Throughout the year, Gupta and Mittal supported 34 and 32 startups, respectively. With 26 deals, Lenskart co-founder Peyush Bansal finished in fourth place.
Shah has supported a few international firms, such as Lista in the Philippines and Jovian in the US. He made investments in Kredmint, Growth School, Allo Health, PickYourTrail, and Gold Setu, among others.
Shah has spent the previous three years ranking among the top five angels (according to volume). He had the most agreements in 2021 with 108, according to the statistics. Shah did not react to the story’s inquiries.
Shah began investing in additional businesses after selling the payments platform Freecharge to Snapdeal in 2015 for a total of $2,800,000,000 in cash and equity.
To be clear, the Tracxn data does not monitor angel investors based on the amount invested; rather, it tracks angels based on the number of deals. In addition, as the dataset only includes individual angel investments, investors that have established family offices, invest through seed or venture capital firms, as well as angel investment networks, are not included.
Gupta, Mittal, and Bansal are also “Sharks” on the Indian version of the popular “Shark Tank” programme, which has a framework that is conducive to angel investment. Investors may write checks ranging from a few lakhs to a few crores on Shark Tank, enabling them to fund a wider variety of businesses.
The judges of the competition, Ashneer Grover of BharatPe and Namita Thapar, CFO of Emcure Pharmaceuticals, were both active angel investors this year, closing 22 and 18, respectively.
According to the number of agreements during the last several years, the programme changed the list of top investors.
In 2021, Rohit Bansal, the co-founder of SnapDeal, came in third with 75 investments, followed by Shah at the top with 108 transactions, and Snapdeal’s Kunal Bahl in second place with 72 deals. Ramakant Sharma, the founder of Homespace unicorn Livspace, came in at number four with 39 investments.
Sharma and the founders of Snapdeal continue to make sizeable angel investments through their investment vehicle Titan Capital.
The top-listers were replaced with fresher, busier angels between 2017 and 2022. Raman Roy, the founder of Quatrro Global Services, was the most active angel investor for three years in a row from 2017 to 2019. In 2017 and 2018, Rajan Anandan, managing director at Sequoia Capital, occupied the second position.
Between 2017 and 2019, the three most active angel investors together invested in 11–24 projects; however, in 2021, that figure increased to 75–108 deals. However, it drops to 32-54 in 2022.
Founders of Indian companies have increasingly stepped out to invest in early-stage enterprises over the years, however, initially, seed funding was generally provided by the founders’ friends and family. But as the Indian startup ecosystem developed, founders stepped forward to aid other businesspeople in their endeavours.
Some people, including Sandeep Aggarwal, the founder of Droom Technology, and Ashwin Damera, the co-founder of Eruditus, created family offices to support the expansion of India’s startup community.
“When you grow up in a country like India, I feel there are oceans of poverty and small islands of prosperity. Thanks to my entrepreneurial journey, I may be in the island-of-prosperity bucket. But, it is our duty to help more people come on from the oceans of poverty,” Damera said in an interview.
