We are looking forward to Mini Seedcamp Mumbai – only two weeks away! Until today we have received a great bunch of team applications and mentoring sessions are set to be top-class. Why? Because we have an all star team of mentors from around the globe coming to mentor the rising entrepreneurial stars of India and the rest of Asia.

Seedcamp-2010Image by Seedcamp Photos via Flickr

We would like to introduce you a few of the mentors who are coming to Mumbai:

To get an even better idea of the quality of our mentors, check out the list of who has joined us at the past events.

One more thing we would like to announce today is the venue of Mini Seedcamp Mumbai. The event will take place at the Mumbai Educational Trust. We are already super excited about it and can hardly wait to board the plane and see the teams in India.

If you haven’t applied with your startup already, do so here until Monday! When selected, you will get a full day of mentoring, feedback and advice – nothing to miss out on. If you are still undecided – check out what our friends from Eyes and Feet had to say about Seedcamp Singapore.
Enhanced by Zemanta
We have evolved Seedcamp into an intensive and productive experience for entrepreneurs to tap into an international platform of mentors to get great advice, build an awesome network, get validation and gain access to capital. At Seedcamp Week in September we were thrilled to announce the strengthening of our team with Carlos and Phillip coming on board to further build out Seedcamp’s international reach and capabilities to support the entrepreneurs, mentors and investors we work with better.
This expanded team is the foundation for us being able to better support every year: the thousands of applications we receive across 11 geographies, our network of 2,000 local mentors, the 200 teams we meet, and the investments that we make and support.
Now, we’re delighted to announce the €3m first closing of Seedcamp’s second fund.
What are our plans for the new funds?
Simple: (1) make more investments and (2) strengthen the breadth and depth of our international platform.
Our first closing is already 50% larger than the first fund we raised in 2007 – this is great news because it means that we can invest in more of the 200 teams we meet and mentor every year through our Mini Seedcamps.
In our first fund, we were able to invest in 22 companies. Already in our second fund we have been able to invest in 11 companies and we are likely to be able to at least treble that number over the next few years.
It seems that every year, the quality of teams gets better. We are continually blown away by the talent we see in every location we visit. This is true in both our mainstream hubs like London, Paris, Berlin and Tel Aviv as well as the regional events we also host in the Nordics, the Balkans, Central Europe and now in Singapore, Johannesburg and Mumbai.
The teams from our first fund came from 12 countries and it was s surprise to many that the teams who attracted top-tier venture backing came from Estonia, Romania and Slovenia. In fact 19 of the 22 companies received more than an aggregate of €15m in follow-on funding, created over 100 jobs and two teams so far – Jordan’s Talasim and Palo Alto’s Mobclix – had successful exits.
Seedcamp is an international network both by design and necessity. The fragmentation in the European market required us to bring a network together and it has been a blessing we have embraced. In fact since 2007, we have grown from our original roots in London, Paris, Berlin into the rest of continental Europe and now into a truly international platform supporting entrepreneurs with on the ground networks from San Francisco and New York to Tel Aviv, Mumbai and Singapore.
We have only been able to do this with the support of: our fantastic initial investors; superb and increasingly creative collaboration with corporate partners including Google, Microsoft,IBM and Paypal; and an amazing collection of mentors who offer time, energy and expertise to help build the next generation of great start-ups. Thank you to you all.
But when we raised our first fund over the summer in 2007 we didn’t have the chance to really extend the reach of our investor as widely as we would have liked. So we are thrilled to welcome new investors in our second fund who further this goal of being deep, not shallow, in local markets.
New additions like Notion Capital, 360 Capital Partners, management team of Team Europe, Ahti Heinla and Lars Hinrichs bring even more of an international and entrepreneurial dimension to Seedcamp – we welcome them, thank our mentors and returning investors and look forward to bringing on additional new investors in the months to come.
We started Seedcamp with a big vision and a long-term ambition – we continue to recognize that we are at the beginning of this journey but we are excited that an international platform is starting to fall into place to let the next great founders from Amman or Tallin continue to launch products in London, raise money in NY, Silicon Valley, or Europe, and have a network to support them wherever they want to do business.
Enhanced by Zemanta

Our friends from Eyes and Feet (winners of Mini Seedcamp Singapore) have written a great and insightful post about attending events as a startup company and how they got acquainted Seedcamp. Serendipity – a word they use very often describing their Seedcamp rollercoaster – should be the best invitation to all of those in India who are thinking of applying to our event in Mumbai. The Eyes and Feet team didn’t know about Seedcamp at all 2 months ago – now, they are fully on board! Read about their experience below:

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting many interesting entrepreneurs in the last few weeks. A few of them asked me why we chose to apply to the Mini Seedcamp in Singapore. This post is a long answer to that question…

Like many other startups, we enjoy abundance. An abundance of optimism, enthusiasm, and joy in building our company and product.And like all other startups, we also suffer from scarcity – a scarcity of resources, primarily talent (we always need more and more talented people) and money (a simpler problem). Most importantly, we suffer from scarcity of TIME

Irrespective of how many hands you have on deck, the ‘To Do’ lists are always longer than a pragmatic mind would allow, and we happily keep adding to feature lists that are already buckling under their own weight.

In such a scenario where time is immensely precious, attending an event is an absolute luxury. And, there are so many startup events these days that someone rightfully said “there seem to be more people wanting to mentor companies than companies wanting mentorship”

So, why then, did we choose to attend Mini Seedcamp Singapore?

Especially when the event is a couple of timezones away!

Especially when it’s a ‘Mini’ event!

Two simple reasons – endorsement and endgame. Hopefully, this rationale may be of use to other startups considering Seedcamp (Seedcamp Mumbai is on December 4th, BTW) or similar events

1) Endorsement We didn’t know of Seedcamp till 2 weeks before we applied. A chance question to Sarah Lacy (TechCrunch) and Fred Wilson (AVC/Union Square) got the ball rolling (here’s how that happened). Needless to say, this was a huge factor – both these well known people (a) being familiar with Seedcamp and (b) recommending it strongly to non US startups. I also thought it serendipitous that this happened just a few days before the close of entries to Seedcamp Singapore. And then, while we were mulling over the Seedcamp application, this article appeared on TechCrunch. More serendipity!

[Side Note: you must read this nice article on the role of serendipity in life, especially in the context of startups]

2) Endgame Yes, events are nice. You meet interesting people, have fun, get some good (and some random) inputs, and often come back with a high-especially if you win (Shameless Plug: we won the Mini Seedcamp at Singapore). Remember, all of this, the ego gratification included, is at the cost of ‘expensive time’ for a startup.

There has to be a more tangible payout to make it worth your time.

I believe Seedcamp offers this in the form of the Seedcamp London event that winners (of Mini Seedcamps) are eligible to attend. At the last ‘Seedcamp Week’ event that happened in September, we had the benefit of seeing how the Seedcamp brand was perceived by investors and media. It was impressive. While we still don’t know yet for sure, I believe that being at Seedcamp London (sometime in Jan 2011) will give us a lot of exposure to intelligent people, potential investors, and some media coverage. Needless to say, that means a lot to any startup.

So, these were the reasons we chose to attend the Mini Seedcamp in Singapore. In retrospect, if I’d known that there was a similar event happening closer home, we’d probably have skipped attending Singapore and applied to Mumbai instead. But then, we can’t complain!

And you know my penchant for ascribing things to serendipity 🙂

To sum up, all those of you in India who asked me about Seedcamp, I suggest you apply to Seedcamp Mumbai right away (the last date is Nov 21st). Feel free to ping me if you need any more inputs.

Good Night, and Good Luck.

Written by Lakshmanan Narayan, CEO and founder of Eyes and Feet, India