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Business News/ Companies / Start-ups/  Brother, can you spare a dime?
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Brother, can you spare a dime?

Startup founders send out cold emails, messages to investors in the hope of attracting their attention to raise funds

Some startup founders make offline cold pitches as well. These could be at conferences and events or ‘speed dating’ sessions with investors. Photo: iStockPremium
Some startup founders make offline cold pitches as well. These could be at conferences and events or ‘speed dating’ sessions with investors. Photo: iStock

Mumbai: “A very Good Morning. We’re a six month old start-up. Traction of More than 1.8 lakh users. Retention jumped from 28% to 62% after our last update. Looking for funding. Need to meet. Can come to any place you call. Waiting for your response." The author of message, who reveals his ‘ISM Dhanbad dropout’ status as he signs off, adds a line at the end. “Rahul Yadav has Zishaan Hayath. I’ve you. Please guide."

The reference is to the Housing.com founder Yadav who successfully pitched his idea to Zishaan Hayath to raise funds.

The startup founder, who sent the LinkedIn message above, is among many who send out cold emails to investors in the hope of attracting their attention to raise funds. Some have been lucky in the past, like electric scooter startup Ather Energy Pvt. Ltd whose founders emailed the Bansals of Flipkart and won investment.

Pitches on Twitter often end up funny due to the 140-character restriction. Recently, Ventureast, an early stage venture capital fund held a #140characterpitch challenge, a Twitter contest for entrepreneurs to share their business ideas in 140 characters via a tweet to @ventureast. If your tweet is shortlisted, you will be invited for a one-on-one with the Ventureast investment team.

According to angel investors who receive such emails and messages that are 8-10 lines long, many are funny, but there are interesting one as well. Sample these messages that landed in the inbox of Sanjay Mehta, investing member with Indian Angel network.

“Vision: To raise $2 million for the company, Mission: Fundraising".

“At this moment, we are in pre-revenue stage, by Diwali we will be fully commercial on the web."

“There are still lot new things can be done and yet to be done in the space of internet, I want to start it with etail; so I please once again request you for funding Sir"

Anil Joshi, managing partner with Unicorn Ventures, has never made any investments in companies that have sent out cold emails. “The concept of cold texts and emails started about two years back. With time, the quality of pitches through cold mails has significantly improved. We didn’t look at such companies earlier, but now we do," said Joshi over the phone.

Some make offline cold pitches as well. These could be at conferences and events or ‘speed dating’ sessions with investors. One such event was organized by the Indian Merchant Chamber in Mumbai on 15 October, where founders made pitches to VCs like Kae Capital and VentureEast, among others.

In August, Mumbai saw Uber Pitch, an interesting offline event where a start-up founder could book a ride in an Uber cab and make a pitch in 15 minutes to the investor sitting in it.

“I was in the cab that covered the Powai area. One funny pitch was made by two IIT students who were looking to raise money for an online scrap selling business. I asked them to put their skills to better use. The same day, I also met founders of a UX UI (user experience/user interface) company, who later got funding from us,’ says Mehta, who has made a total of 40 personal investments, six of which were pitched through cold texts or mails.

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Published: 29 Oct 2015, 01:30 PM IST
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