Resources

The amount of venture capital invested into agriculture is large and growing. In 2013, VC and PE investment into agriculture ventures tripled to Rs 2,000 crore. To understand the types of investment made into the sector during the past decade,

How Startups are bringing supply chain management to Indian Ag Cloud based SCM startups are transforming the efficiency of Indian agribusiness through integration. One-third of all food produced in India is wasted before reaching consumer due to poor infrastructure and

Welcome to the next post in this series on impact measurement! Quickly summarizing the previous post for entrepreneurs: It’s important to identify metrics that can be tied directly into your business operations. Presuming that your social impact is built-in to

By adopting the use of portable vision screeners throughout India, the vision of approximately 10 lakhs (1m) children can be treated and saved before the onset of permanent damage from amblyopia Amblyopia: Affecting 10 lakhs (1m) Children Every Year Amblyopia

The Momentum of Aadhaar, India’s Universal ID System, is Increasing   India has a population of approximately 1.3 billion people today; however, the country does not have a formal system of universal identification for each of its citizens, analogous to

At Unitus Ventures, we invest in “BoP Startups” – early stage impact businesses that serve low income populations. I have been working for some months to apply my academic measurement and evaluation training to create a BoP Startup-friendly framework for

As Aadhaar continues to enroll thousands of Indians each day and add terabytes of data to its Central Identity Data Repository, MongoDB and other data management and analytics software providers continue to produce insights that will aid Aadhaar and the

Experiencing phenomenal growth driven in large part by the rapid and large-scale deployment of Aadhaar, India’s biometrics market may reach $2 billion by 2018. Aadhaar has now existed for more than five years and in that period, the Planning Commission

In conjunction with the announcement of our third India healthcare seed funding investment in the past 100 days, we are announcing our intention to invest in another 3-4 healthcare startups in 2014. We are also pleased to announce that Dr.

As a result of Aadhaar, India will become a hotbed for new startups and investment opportunities serving India’s low-income BoP population. Many would argue that Aadhaar (also known as UID or Universal Id) is one of India’s most revolutionary and

The mobile Value Added Services (mVAS) industry has gained momentum, due to low-cost smartphones enabling Indian entrepreneurs to innovate banking, education and healthcare. The earlier posts in this series dwell on the exponential growth of affordable smartphones in India and

Competition is decreasing costs while increasing quality in the smartphone market, leading to a win-win for impact enterprises and the BoP population. An earlier update (India: The meteoric rise of smartphones) discusses the favorable situation prevailing in the Indian mobile

Due to smartphone affordability and mass adoption, internet and mobile services have reached the masses in India, leading to new business opportunities. Both the mobile phone industry and the PC industry have witnessed two major evolutions: the first of breakthrough

In the past 12 months, we received 100’s of pitches from Indian startups looking to raise seed venture capital. I would say that at least 80% of the pitches were challenging to understand. That is, we as investors had to

Start-up focused professional firms will work with portfolio companies to help them prepare for extraordinary growth Today, we announced our new Catapult Partners program along with our first seven professional firms that are committing to provide expert support for our

The start of the calendar New Year is a good time for reflection. Every year, some 15 million aspiring young adults enter the workforce in India, many knowing that the chances of finding a job are not favorable. Millions struggle

Unitus Capital has issued their first impact equity research report. They note that in 2013, impact equity investing continued to be an important component of the India private equity landscape comprising 23% of the overall private equity transactions in India.

Rural parents looking for high-quality pre-school programs flocking to Hippocampus 20 January 2014 — Bangalore, India. Hippocampus Learning Centres Pvt Ltd (“Hippocampus”), a Bangalore-based leader in affordable private rural pre-school programs in India, announced that they have raised an additional

As one of India’s most active venture capital investors, we get the opportunity to participate in a lot of board meetings. Some are good. Many are not so good. In most cases when we invest, the company’s board consists of

In part 3 of this series we explored the burden of healthcare expenses and health financing models. In this part 4 of our series on India healthcare impact investing, we explore the current status and the novel business solutions within