The Journey So Far (Part 2)
Looking back at two years of investing at Globevestor
As we wrote in our inaugural post, Globevestor just completed 2 years of active investing in early-stage startups. It has been a very enriching journey for us and we’ve come a long way in building a quality portfolio, a truly global investor community and defining our approach towards investing in high-impact ideas. Our experience in these 2 years has also validated our deeply held belief that a lot of efficiency, transparency and trust can be brought about in early-stage startup investing.
In this post, we share a summary of where we’ve reached till now and a glimpse of the plans ahead.
At Globevestor, we believe that we’ll be successful if we continously invest in startups which deliver products and experiences serving huge unmet needs. This will be possible for us if we build a truly engaged investor network and a curated & diverse portfolio of highly promising startups. The early signs on these are encouraging and give us high confidence that we’ll be able to continue growing in the long term and build lasting value.
In summary, we have made 21 investments in the past 24 months, investing in only about 2–3% startups that pitch to us. Many of our portfolio startups have raised follow-on funding from marquee investors, including Sequoia, MSDF, Nokia Growth Partners and Ford. Overall, our portfolio companies have raised about $64 million in total and are collectively valued at nearly $175 million!
Our Portfolio
Globevestor has grown to a strong and diversified portfolio across 21 startup investments now, and continues to grow steadily. We’ve taken a sector agnostic approach and our portfolio includes a wide variety of startups, such as B2B SaaS, B2C internet, hardware, food, transport, education, finance, media and offline infrastructure. Our investments also represent a spectrum of business models, ranging from subscription commerce, SaaS, freemium, commission, pay-as-you-use, to even services. We continue to explore promising opportunities across diverse domains.
These investments represent only 2–3% of all the startups that pitched to us. While Globevestor is highly selective, we ensure that our process remains quick and efficient, which enables fast closures and money in the bank as soon as possible. On an average, it now takes us only 15 days from the day we launch an investment online to closure of commitments — which we believe is highly efficient in the ecosystem.
Our Investor Network
Globevestor has been able to build a highly engaged & truly global investor network. We now have over 600 investors on our online platform from five continents. A majority of our investors belong to the US, Singapore, UK, Canada and Europe.
We are really proud of the level of engagement of this investor network with us. Over 45% of the investors who’ve made an investment on Globevestor have become repeat investors! Moreover, our investor network is also our key evangelist — nearly 25% of our investors have referred and brought other investors to the platform. We have grown till date largely by word of mouth and our investor network has been our key proponent.
In general, while our investment minimum is usually $2,000, the average cheque written by investors is about $5,500. We emphasize the need to build a diversified portfolio of investments for investors to increase the chance of success and returns.
Our investor network is very diverse in terms of professional background as well. The network includes successful entrepreneurs, active angels, top executives, investment bankers, management consultants and middle-management in large technology companies. A lot of connections for founders from us and the investor network have led to business development opportunities, partnerships and follow-on investments.
Our Success
We define our success along three broad metrics: 1) Ability to consistently invest in high impact startups that deliver products & experiences that people want, 2) Continuously growing and creating lasting value, and 3) Validation of the portfolio from market forces, such as scale up of revenues, profitability, and follow-on fundraises.
We believe our portfolio is doing well on these metrics till date. About 30% of our portfolio investments have already raised a follow-on round. We have supported our companies by leading or investing in their follow-on rounds as far as possible. Overall, our portfolio companies have raised a total of $64 million in investments and are collectively valued at nearly $175 million.
In addition, our portfolio companies have been able to attract capital from leading investors in the ecosystem. These include institutional investors like Sequoia, Kalaari, 500 Startups, Nokia Growth Partners, MSDF and Ford, as well as individual angels like Allen Blue, Larry Summers, Sachin Bansal, Neeraj Arora and Vijay Shekhar Sharma.
We are cognizant of the fact that there is a high failure rate in early-stage investing and half of a statistically-significant portfolio is expected to not return the invested capital. However, we hope to continue adding more highly-promising startups to our portfolio and support the existing ones in building upon their success.
We believe this is just a beginning for Globevestor. In the past 2 years, we’ve closely witnessed the inefficient, opaque and complicated processes that mar early-stage investing — not just in emerging markets, but globally. This has made us even more bullish about the disruption technology can bring to early- stage investing.
We’ve already begun on that path and are eager to find out what the next 2 years will bring with them. The platform has been set. The early learnings are in place.
So, watch this space!
