Tandem, Kae Cap to jointly hunt for Indian tech talent

MUMBAI: Silicon Valley mobile start-up accelerator Tandem Capital is teaming up with pioneering home grown early-stage investor Sasha Mirchandani to jointly identify local tech and mobile talent coming out of India.
Tandem, launched by Doug Renert and Sunil Bhargava in 2007, counts Manipal Education and Medical Group CEO Ranjan Pai and ex-Infosys director T V Mohandas Pai among its investors.
The cross-border partnership between Tandem and Mirchandani's Kae Capital will help Indian mobile and tech start-ups plug into the famed Valley ecosystem for greater exposure at a time when a plethora of early stage accelerators have mushroomed to tap India’s burgeoning startup action.
“India currently has a rich pipeline of ventures in the products space. What we can facilitate is the connection to the Valley which is extremely beneficial for these startups. However, we want these companies and entrepreneurs to ultimately flourish in India,” Bhargava of Tandem told TOI.
Mirchandani’s Kae Capital which makes angel investments across mobile, e-commerce, education, healthcare, and consumer internet companies has an existing corpus of $25 million and is looking to raise a new fund after a few months. Kae has been an early backer of startups like InMobi, Healthkart and Myntra among others.
Mirchandani, whose family owns MIRC Electronics, the makers of Onida brand, said Tandem’s Valley experience would benefit Indian startups immensely just as his ground level expertise in India would come in handy for Tandem.
“We see a lot of synergies between the two of us which will help us spot scalable startups in consumer facing businesses in tech and mobile, " he added.
Having raised a $100 million in funds last year, Tandem was recently in news for making a 100x return on investment in Bangalore-based mobile gaming company Bash Gaming, which was acquired by GSN Games, a unit of Sony, for around $165 million.
Bhargava said Tandem enters portfolio companies early and would stay for long. The accelerator invests typically $200,000 each for an initial six months in a dozen ventures every year.
Pune-based Shoptimize is one of the Indian companies it has in its current batch. The plan is to get a few more ventures on board very soon, Bhargava said. Tandem typically invests small amounts but combines that with hands-on support to the startups.