Samyakth Capital — Year in Review (2020–2021)
2020! What a year this has been, one that will go down in the history books for teaching us multiple things but also reminding us about our resilience as a civilization. The so called “Black Swan” event of 2020 has been so detrimental as well as so opportunistic for multiple people in all walks of their lives.
At Samyakth Capital, we were fortunate enough to realize the severity of the pandemic very early on due to our association with @Coutloot who had major operations in China. This head start allowed us to rally up our portfolio companies who were amid their fund raise to accelerate the process. Last year was more about survival rather than cap table optimization. April and May of 2020 was about showing our support to invested companies rather than take on more opportunities, a decision that was well appreciated by the 43 companies we had invested in up till that point.
While the world was awaiting the vaccine and work from home had become the new norm, entrepreneurs were busy brewing new ideas. In July 2020, Samyakth Capital had made its first new investment of FY 2021. We were quick to restart investments while the public markets were taking a beating. Private investments from HNI’s as well as seed stage investors were back to pre-pandemic levels, the kind of positive news majority of founders were looking for. August of 2020 was a significant month as 6 of the portfolio companies managed to raise subsequent rounds, exceeding the valuation benchmark they set for themselves respectively. While offline distribution focused FMCG companies in the portfolio were still struggling with the lockdown, the fintechs focusing on payments were booming. @Assure Clinics was awaiting clearance from the government to re-open its 8 centers pan- India while @BharatPe (more about them later) was in the news every 3 weeks for a new development regarding investments.
Investment number 45, 46 and 47 happened very quickly in the month of November 2020. These were those companies whose mettle and execution capability were put to test during the pandemic and we at Samyakth Capital were awaiting their responses to these trying times before writing the check. All these three investments had lending in their 3-year road map, a space we are very bullish about for the next decade in India. This thesis gave birth to Samyakth Labs — all things Fintech. Samyakth Labs aims to support very early-stage companies with equity capital and also give them NBFC support through our partner firms. Galaxy Card, the digital card for Bharat was the first baby of Samyakth Labs and has been able to scale 11x since its association with Labs. We currently have 3 companies that are part of Samyakth Labs.
By December 2020, we focused a majority of time on evaluating the opportunities at Samyakth Labs as well as evaluate revenue-based financing as a new investment method. We thank portfolio company GetVantage for that and being the pioneer in this new asset class. A total of 6 deals were done through GetVantage between December and January 2021.
As we completed our 4-year anniversary in March 2021, there have been key learnings along the way. Most of these learnings have not come at a huge price because we have been fortunate enough to experience 0 busts in our portfolio. Considering the stage, we come in and the asset class we are in, this is something we are extremely proud of. Samyakth Capital has been very selective in its investments over the past 48 months. Last year the team evaluated over 250 deals and we invested in only 10 companies. This year marked our biggest exit yet via *drumroll* — @BharatPe. A whooping 80x return on our investment made in 2018 via secondary sale to their incoming investor. Additional exits from Team FloBiz (4.4x) and @ClearDekho (3x) took our total of multi bagger exits to 6! Did I also mention: we were first investors in @Dukaan; kindly wait slightly longer for a mouth watering update on that.
Samyakth Capital intends to continue focusing on more revenue based financing as well venture debt deals in the coming year. Fintech, Deeptech and SaaS will be the major themes we will be focusing on for equity investments.
Samyakth Capital wishes to thank all its investors and the portfolio companies for their constant support and valuable inputs during the course of the past year without which this success would not have been possible.
