Exclusive: Abhijeet Kumar, Co-founder, ah! Ventures believes in working with only seasoned professionals

Abhijeet Kumar, Co-founder, ah! Ventures is an entrepreneur who created a network link between entrepreneurs and start-ups to facilitate more funding deals between them.

With over 1500 active investors, the platform is a boon for people who wish to venture into start-up investment but have inhibitions in terms of the process.

The entity has created tools to facilitate the process such as Venture Financing and Venture Analytics to help the investor make an informed choice when it comes to investment. High-risk and high-return

“We get more than 500 deal requests every month and because this process is pro-investor, it means that it has its pros and cons. While the companies get to decide their own valuation, they struggle to get a lead investor and the autonomy can be tricky,” Kumar told Business Insider.

Kumar thinks that while the ecosystem has evolved, there are very few active investors “ah! Ventures was started to facilitate more deals but quality trumps over quantity for us, every time. Since 2012, we have seen the ecosystem grow but we are still behind as India is a huge country with entrepreneurs sitting with ideas at desk jobs. The leap of faith will only take place when more start-ups start raising money.”
While ah! Ventures doesn’t plan on venturing out of the country, they hope to get more foreign investors on board as they are open to more high-risk-high-return investments.

The entity charges 4% success fees once the round is raised but Kumar says that even that goes back into their own investments which have been at 12 companies out of 30.
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“Our focus is slowly shifting to non-internet companies as we see higher returns in that sector. That said, most of them are still technology-led,” says Kumar who believes in companies that make money and not just by raising more funds.

Another interesting thing about ah! Ventures is that they have only hired people who are or have been entrepreneurs, “Our entire team is made up of serial entrepreneurs who have either started successful companies that can be left to function on their own while they work with us or really experienced businessmen,” says Kumar who believes in working with seasoned professionals as most of the younger lot have to still figure out how businesses work.’