By Tanuj Saraf | 15 April 2024
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us."
We, at Merak, had a great start to the year as both of our SpaceTech bets (Pixxel and Bellatrix Aerospace) are now space-qualified in their respective domains, so it felt befitting to write using context borrowed from space and its unending grandness.
On February 14, 1990, Voyager 1 satellite, while passing by Neptune, turned its camera around to take one of the most iconic pictures of Earth from space, famously known as “Pale Blue Dot”. At the time, the satellite launched by NASA was 6 billion kms away from earth i.e., we could fit half a million earths between us and the satellite. Today, Voyager 1 is still going strong at 24 billion kms from earth. Staring at that image makes us realise a lot about the scale of things we do, and the impact it can create.
As investors, as much as we’d like to think of us as Superman, we are probably much closer to astronauts venturing into the vast expanse of the universe to look for stars (startups) that show promise. Venturing into the unknown is always risky (venture being called risk capital perhaps has some grounds to it) and often requires long gestation periods for the moats to form or meaningful revenues to come in, but that’s almost always true when you look for companies that alter the grand scheme of things.
As a part of our job of being Superman (or did we decide on Astronaut?) it is imperative for us to push out content that helps founders understand our investment thesis. Here are a few short points from the non exhaustive list:
● We aren’t stage-agnostic but we’re not sticklers to the conventional stage definitions either. If the investment falls within our fund parameters, we’d like to have a look. We’ve funded ideas in ideation stage to startups raising pre-A at times
● We don’t expect DeepTech companies to start making revenues right off the bat, SpaceX took four years to generate its first revenue. Having invested in rockstar companies like LightspeedAI Labs to CynLr from our first fund, growX Fund I, we understand very well the fact that most of these companies require a gestation period during which founders can focus on heads down building
● We don’t want founders to solve every problem on day 1. Building a startup is more like running a marathon than a sprint. So, we expect founders to be ambitious with their goals, but also realistic in the approach they want to take
● When JFK announced during a speech in 1962 that humanity will set foot on the moon before the end of the decade, humanity did not have the tech to do so. But, with our scientific ingenuity, agility and dynamism, we figured a way out. In the same fashion, starting up, inherently, is tricky in nature. It’s alright, if the ideas aren’t ironed out yet. Sometimes, you only learn when you get your hands dirty in the mud. But we do expect the team to be agile and dynamic in the manner they think
● As against the popular grapevine, “an idea has to be cutting edge and revolutionary to get VCs interested”, we equally love ideas that are grounded in reality. Electric vehicles were invented in the 19th century, but it took more than 100 years for a company like Tesla to come about and make them mainstream, and in the process change the face of an entire industry
We’ll be the first ones to raise our hands and agree that we aren’t always sure what the end product or business model of a company that we invest in would look like, and often rely on the conviction in the founders’ vision as well as thought process. However, if the idea has merit in the grand scheme of things, we have the luxury and, to some degree, responsibility to take a bet on it.
Turning back the pages of time and looking at the past decade, makes us realise how far we’ve come. From questioning, “Can DeepTech be developed in India” to asking, “Which will be the next DeepTech startup to come out of India” a lot has changed. Just within our portfolio of companies from our first fund, growX Fund I, we have companies like LightspeedAI which is working on cutting -edge optoelectronic processors, to Bellatrix Aerospace, which makes thrusters for satellites. We have Pixxel which does hyperspectral imagery, to CynLr which is building a vision stack for robots. This makes us excited about the state of tech we’re in, as well as the opportunities that lie ahead of us.
We’re an early stage B2B venture fund, consider this our Bat-Signal to all the founders to reach out to us for a chat. Coffee on us if you can beat us in a game of pool.