Anand Chandrasekaran, prolific angel investor and former chief product officer of Snapdeal, has invested an undisclosed amount in LetsVenture — an online platform for startups to raise funding.
Commenting on the investment, Shanti Mohan, co-founder of LetsVenture, said,
Going forward, the plan is to maintain our leader position in being the largest marketplace for start-up funding. With Anand’s investment, he also brings expertise on online marketplaces, having built one and invested in other marketplaces. He is also a very active angel investor, that he works with his portfolio companies, he is very supportive and helps the start-ups out in building products.
LetsVenture, registered in Singapore, was founded in the year 2013. It has offices in India and the US and operates an online platform that allows start-ups and investors to connect, while also allowing the former to raise funds.
The platform had previously raised an undisclosed amount in series A in 2015 from Ratan Tata, chairman emeritus of Tata Sons Ltd; former Infosys board member Mohandas Pai; Accel Partners, People Group’s Anupam Mittal, Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, Snapdeal’s Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, Wipro’s Rishad Premji, and Freshdesk’s Girish Mathrubootham.
The company claims to have facilitated 105 deals amounting to $40 million since its launch, which the company targets to increase to $100 million in next two years.
On the platform, both start-ups and investors are screened through and evaluated before their profiles go live on the platform. As per the company, it receives 200-250 investor requests per month, while it sees 25-30 start-ups create their profile daily.
Anand Chandrasekaran has made over 35 investments so far, in start-ups such as fashion discovery platform Wooplr, online lingerie brand Buttercups Intimate, cyber security company Lucideus Tech, among others.
After leaving Snapdeal in May 2016, Chandrasekaran had announced that he would join Facebook. He holds M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and was employed at Bharti Airtel as the Chief Product Officer, before joining Snapdeal. Moreover, in 2016, he was featured in Fortune’s ’40 under 40′ list of influential business leaders.
