A Nest Where Budding Entrepreneurs Are Nurtured YourNest Venture Capital believes in giving flight to founders' dreams
By S Shanthi
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Sunil K. Goyal, Girish Shivani and Sanjay Pande gave up their steady paycheques to do something where they could help create jobs for one set of people and also help another set invest and earn much more. That is why they launched YourNest Venture Capital in 2012. All of them came with unique skillsets and experiences that complemented each other, and they created the concept of a nest where fledgling entrepreneurs are nurtured, ideas are hatched and the spirit of enterprise continues to thrive.
The firm's logo also connotes the idea of giving flight to founders' dreams. "While the three of us came from diverse corporate careers, we have two things in common: we learn fast, and we course-correct without wavering from our long-term commitment. I now realize that we are the original "Challengineers', a badge we give to the remarkable founders in whom we invest our unique "nurture capital'," said Sunil K. Goyal, managing director, YourNest Venture Capital.
And so, they overcame anger, anxiety and apprehension and moved their investment thesis away from B2C to B2B startups in the deeptech domain who were solving real-world problems that had global potential. "Because we were among the first to do so, we also earned the trust of government-backed institutions such as SIDBI and accolades from Prequin and CRISIL," he added.
One of the firm's early investments was Uniphore where they were involved at multiple levels. It took them six years but, at the height of last year's pandemic, they finally rewarded their investors with a 6.6x return from this maiden exit. They also exited another company, SmartQ, last year. "When we launched our second fund in 2017, we had 40 per cent commitment from existing Fund 1 investors – without them having a single rupee returned because we had had zero exits. This is how we have built trust across all our funds. Faith is a remarkable fuel and that is what has powered our engine," said Goyal.
The firm has launched its $75 mn third fund, focused on innovative, technology-led products: a significant portion of the investment commitment has been fulfilled and the team has already started deploying funds from here.
