Aman Gupta, Anupam Mittal, and Kunal Shah among most active angel investors

• ByStartupStory     |    December 30, 2022

BENGALURU: According to data from startup and private deal intelligence platform Tracxn, Kunal Shah, founder of fintech unicorn Cred, was India’s most active angel investor in 2022 with 54 bets. He was followed by Aman Gupta, co-founder of wearables brand boAt, and Anupam Mittal, founder of Mumbai-based People Group, the parent company of matrimonial portal Shaadi.com. Throughout the year, Gupta and Mittal supported 34 and 32 startups, respectively. With 26 deals, Lenskart co-founder Peyush Bansal finished in fourth place.

Shah has supported a few international firms, such as Lista in the Philippines and Jovian in the US. He made investments in Kredmint, Growth School, Allo Health, PickYourTrail, and Gold Setu, among others.  For the past three years, Shah has consistently been among the top five angels (according to volumes). According to the data, he had the most agreements in 2021 with 108. Inquiries regarding the story went unanswered from Shah.  After selling payments platform Freecharge to Snapdeal in 2015 in a deal of $2,800 crore in cash and equity, Shah began investing in other firms.

To be clear, the Tracxn data does not track angels based on the amount invested; instead, it tracks trades. The dataset, which only includes individual angel investments, does not include investors that have established family offices, invest through seed or venture capital firms, as well as angel investment networks.

Additionally, Gupta, Mittal, and Bansal are “Sharks” on the Indian version of the international “Shark Tank” programme, which has a format that is conducive to angel investing. Investors in Shark Tank are able to write checks for amounts between a few lakhs and a few crores, enabling them to fund a wider range of businesses.

The judges of the competition, Ashneer Grover of BharatPe and Namita Thapar, CFO of Emcure Pharmaceuticals, were both active angel investors this year, closing 22 and 18, respectively. 

According to the quantity of agreements during the previous several years, the show changed the list of top investors.  In 2021, Rohit Bansal, the co-founder of SnapDeal, came in third with 75 investments, followed by Shah at the top with 108 deals, and Snapdeal’s Kunal Bahl in second place with 72 deals. Ramakant Sharma, the founder of Homespace unicorn Livspace, came in at number four with 39 investments.

Sharma and the founders of Snapdeal continue to make sizable angel investments through their investment vehicle Titan Capital.  The top-listers were replaced with fresher, busier angels between 2017 and 2022. Raman Roy, the founder of Quatrro Global Services, was the most active angel investor for three years in a row from 2017 to 2019. In 2017 and 2018, Rajan Anandan, managing director at Sequoia Capital, occupied the second position. Between 2017 and 2019, the three most active angel investors collectively invested in 11–24 projects; however, in 2021, that figure increased to 75–108 deals. However, it drops to 32-54 in 2022. 

Founders of Indian companies have increasingly stepped forward to invest in early-stage enterprises over the years, however initially seed funding was typically provided by the founders’ friends and family. But as the Indian startup ecosystem developed, founders stepped forward to aid other businesspeople in their endeavors.

Some people, like Sandeep Aggarwal, the founder of Droom Technology, and Ashwin Damera, the co-founder of Eruditus, created family offices to support the expansion of India’s startup community. 

Last month Damera said in an interview, “When you grow up in a country like India, I feel there are oceans of poverty and small islands of prosperity. Thanks to my entrepreneurial journey, I may be in the island-of-prosperity bucket. But, it is our duty to help more people come on from the oceans of poverty.”

Follow Startup Story