Utilis Capital Advisors Aims To Bridge Gap Between Investor And Entrepreneur

In the last 2-3 years, startups in India have been infamous for burning investor money and shutting shop prematurely. Predictably, there has been a gap between investor and entrepreneur expectations that led to this. Serial entrepreneur Manishh Anand aims to bridge this long existing gap and this is where Utilis Capital Advisors is born.

With a core team of 8 people from varied backgrounds, Utilis Capital Advisors, have been working since the last 8 months on creating a novel structure which resolves the challenges from both the Investors’ and the Investees’ perspectives. It is setting up a Rs 100-crore Category I AIF SEBI approved early stage fund, focussed on pure play disruptive technologies and technology leveraged consumer businesses. “Utilis is itself a disruptive startup in the investment space,” says Anand, founder and chairman of Utilis. “The fund has been established out of the need to change the way the current startup ecosystem is working.”

So, what did really go wrong in the past? In the last 2-3 years, both entrepreneurs and investors were only chasing scale, as a result of which the businesses lost sight of sustainability or profitability, Anand says. However, according to industry experts, 2016 promises to be different for both the startup and investor community. For startups, the fund raising time is expected to increase to 1 year from 6 months, and for the investors, they would be expecting a faster breakeven period. Investors will also start sharing the risk with the promoters and valuations are expected to be more real than inflated, industry experts opined.

Keeping in mind the latest changes and challenges in the ecosystem, Utilis believes it can make a difference. “Utilis plans to back those promoters whose ideas possess the ability to scale rapidly, address a large market size, solve a unique customer pain point, as well as have a clear sight of breakeven within 18 – 24 months. We call our fund as an ‘Innovative Fail-Safe Seed Investments Engine and our goal is to be the ‘First Investor of Choice’ for the startups,” Anand says.

Utilis focuses on pure play disruptive technology and tech-leveraged startups. “Disruptive technologies would include the likes of robotics, artificial intelligence, internet of things (IOT), machine-to-machine (MTM) and some bit of cloud and data while tech-leveraged would encompass fin tech, health tech, agri tech, logistics tech, transport tech, etc.,” Anand says.

Utilis has a dedicated team of corporate CXOs, startup founders, angel investors and industry thought leaders with which it plans to leverage the concept of “Collective wisdom to take informed decisions of investments and exits.” Also, unlike earlier, when mentors were largely ad-hoc, Utilis aims to have commercially compensated mentors who would engage with the entrepreneurs right from building their roadmaps to handholding them at every stage and periodic monitoring of their performance.

Utilis aims to close around 12-16 deals this year with an average per deal size of Rs 50 lakh - 2 crore in case of co-investments and Rs 2 - 5 crore in case of lead investments.