We Founder Circle (WFC), a founders led early-stage start-up investment platform has successfully invested in 30 start-ups across 10 sectors in its first year of operation. The platform has been able to facilitate a total fund worth 12M USD across the investment deals. Unlike other investment platforms and incubators, We Founder Circle, platform connects entrepreneurs directly with potential investors who have founded successful start-ups themselves. The model is not just facilitating investments but also promoting founders turned investors to back the budding entrepreneurs.
We Founder Circle team has taken the sector-agnostic approach. The majority of the investments enabled by We Founder Circle are in the Consumer D2C sector followed by AgriTech, Fintech, Edtech and others. The platform aids the investments through a strong network of over 2000+ angel investors spread globally. Simultaneously, the brand is also focussing on empowering women entrepreneurs that are leading around 30% of the WFC start-up portfolio.
Amit Tyagi, Cofounder iServeU Tech, Abhishek Gupta, CEO APAC & ME, Turbotic, Dr Aloknath, Veteran Technologist, Dravya Dholakia, Dholakia Ventures, Siddharth Shah, MD Rajesh Motors Ankur Jain, Eminent Cars, Hitesh Dhawan, Founder Neuronimbus, Gaurav Juneja, Textile Entrepreneur has been the top investors participated in multiple investments throughout the year. 20 % of WFC portfolio start-ups are also funded by the Unicorn Founders. Furthermore than 25% of WFC portfolio start-ups have Female founders.
“Building a start-up demand a lot of tangible and intangible support. While you are stepping into entrepreneurship, you seek an investor that would understand the early hurdles, and mentor you sharing the same wavelength. WFC weaved this model to fill in the long-existing gap and mark its success, it today stands tall closing 30+ successful investment deals in its first year of incorporation. The start-ups are witnessing high scale growth and more than 25% of them raised their next round of funds within 6-7 months of investment from our side.” said Neeraj Tyagi-Co-founder and CEO, We Found Circle.
Community Builder and one of the Co-founders of We Founder Circle Gaurav VK Singhvi has been spreading awareness about the angle investment and start-up mentoring start-up community across India. He has taken several masterclasses on How angle investment becomes the asset class investment in cities like Nagpur, Raipur, Surat, Vadodara, Jaipur, Dehradun etc.
On the success of the first-year operation Gaurav VK Singhvi, Co-Founder We Founder Circle affirmed“One of the prime reasons for this milestone achievement is the active participation of investors from tier 2 and tier 3 cities. We have been able to engage HNIs and founder turned investors from over 40 tier 2 and tier 3 cities in India. 70 percent of WFC angel investors are from these cities. We aim at adding at least 2000 more investors from tier 2/3 town in the next year.”
“Within the first year, WFC has spread its wings across 16 countries globally. Despite the pandemic, we were able to attract angels from various geographies to participate in the startup investment deals. 15% percentage of the funds have been infused by investors from outside India,” said Bhawna Bhatnagar, Head of Global Partnerships & Co-founder, We Founder Circle
We Founder Circle has taken a lot of strategic steps to become the first investment platform to close 30+ deals in its first year of incorporation. The recently launched Global accelerator programme ’EVOLVEX’ further acted catalyst and became the launchpad for the latest 6 deals in the last quarter of the running calendar year. The brand aims at closing 60 deals in the next calendar year 2022.
