We founded WaterBridge Ventures in 2016 with a vision of creating a true venture catalyst for entrepreneurship. India had come off the peak of an aggressive funding cycle of consumer internet start-ups by traditional venture capital as well as non-traditional capital chasing growth, leading to many disappointing outcomes. Many rookie entrepreneurs and me-too avatars of global business models were finding hard to survive in a choked funding environment thereafter.

We could see bright spots in tech led disruption across sectors, regulatory tailwinds within the backdrop of the development of the Indian start-up ecosystem. $2 Trillion high growth Indian economy was getting fueled with mobile devices, young consumers, digital inflection points and entrepreneurial aspirations.

We are convinced that by 2030, India would see at least US$ 200 Billion of value creation through US$ 50 Billion of growth investments in technology disruption. In this backdrop we raised WBV-I and have built a portfolio of promising consumer and enterprise businesses. We continue to build our franchise to realize our vision and we love what we do!

Deep value-add is our guiding principle and we catalyse a business in various unique ways.

We understand the value of networks. We connect the dots and provide opportunities for our portfolio across our wide network.

We are a sounding board for our founder partners. We recognise the solitude in entrepreneurship. We can brainstorm or strategize, and our unique quality is that we can play a peer or a mentor equally well.

We help in capacity building. Great team is quintessential to building a successful business and we assist founders in building their dream team.

We are good at pattern recognition. We can provide the missing links in the jigsaw puzzle of building a future-proof business.

We back entrepreneurs’ dreams with a core philosophy that Founders come first. We can relate to their aspirations since we have ourselves been entrepreneurs. All the partners at WaterBridge have been entrepreneurs, operators in the technology world as well as fund managers in the past. That is a rare repertoire of experience in the VC asset class. Our background underlines our unique value proposition of high value-add, empathetic investment partnership model. We also understand portfolio construction very well and hence we don’t do spray-and-pray or follow voguish investment themes.

Entrepreneurs appreciate our approach because we are different. We have been around the world of investing a long time but we approach every discussion with humility with our learning hat constantly on. We like to be honest in our feedback and engagement. We believe that we are fortunate beings since we get to meet passionate entrepreneurs every day and learn about how they will change the status quo.

Driven and hungry founders is the most important aspect of our investment thesis. We believe passion can’t be taught and we prefer EQ over IQ. We back founders with a high opportunity cost of entrepreneurship.

We believe in entrepreneurs that are going after large markets with a strong product-market alignment. Narrowly focused products seldom succeed and we prefer high product-market fit above over-engineering.

We measure sustainable moat in all the ventures we evaluate because great businesses are not built in a flash. To build lasting value takes perseverance. We have a global view but evaluate businesses in the local context. Entrepreneurs who learn, pivot and exploit inflection points have a better chance of building sustainable moat.

Successful businesses have profitable unit economics. We believe that every business has a unique path to profitability and we don’t evaluate companies through a fixed lens.