“From our first conversation itself, WaterBridge felt like true partners, trusting our vision, helping with connections and most importantly keeping it real and grounded”
“WaterBridge has helped us more before deal closure than others would even from the cap table. We are glad to have found a partner who is long on ‘India-first’ businesses”
“WaterBridge has been a source of sage advice and constant support for us – a true partner in building Magicpin”
“Many can give you money, but only WaterBridge will help you think big, and will roll up their sleeves to actually help you get there. If you are a Series A or Seed stage startup, we would strongly recommend you to take WaterBridge over anyone else including all the big names”
“From the get-go, WaterBridge respected our time, moved quickly and began to add value before they even made an investment”
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Founders come from a traditional brick-and-mortar business with no tech-start-up expertise. K-12 Ed-Tech space requires differentiated content to succeed.
Founders understand the student pain point better than >150 Ed-Tech start-ups we met in K-12. Product-first approach and content pull via DIY doubt-solving for Bharat will be the differentiated growth strategy.
WaterBridge led Seed in 2018.
DoubtNut is India’s most used and fastest growing Ed-Tech App tapping into 135m vernacular students. Differentiated further by low CAC and a content development engine of >4m videos feeding into its ML engine. We exited DoubtNut during its acquisition by Allen Career Institute in 2023.
Another grocery delivery app in a red ocean market with JioMart being an established behemoth. Group buying and small town focus is not a differentiator.
Trust based local and assisted commerce is more likely to work in small Indian towns. Contribution margins can make sense for daily consumables if local micro-entrepreneurs can be tech co-opted.
WaterBridge invested in Pre-Series A in 2020
CityMall is a Series C company that has pioneered a locally driven, assisted, community driven, group buying platform in India. Targeting the over 300M value focused small-town Indian consumers for whom offline supermarkets options for attractive deals and offers are literally far and few. CityMall has built trust in transacting on mobile through local community leaders under an assisted group buying model with a market leading presence across 10 cities.
B2B e-commerce already has Udaan as a winner, not sure about another B2B player. Business focused on footwear as a category and not sure of market depth or expansion possibility beyond footwear.
Founders are the right ‘horses for this course’ given family business background in footwear. Dogged supply-side focus together with tech-led disruption will create a profitable business and long-term moats.
WaterBridge led Pre-Series A in 2019
Bijnis is a Series C Company with over 4,000 manufacturing units or factories using the app to drive demand and receiving orders from >50,000 registered retailers. With 100% of operations being tech-enabled, Bijnis has expanded beyond footwear into apparel and accessories and counts Info Edge, Matrix, WestBridge and Sequoia among its investors.
An erstwhile auto-retail i.e. CarWale entrepreneurial team cannot solve for intra-city, public transport. This is a small and highly regulated market
Founding team has an optimum combination of operations and technology skill sets to disrupt the space. Bus mobility is 4x of ride hailing market. Tech-driven business model and supply side partnerships can create moats.
WaterBridge led Series A in 2017
Chalo emerged as the best resurgence story in mobility post-CoVID. Chalo is India’s largest platform for mass daily commute. A Series D company, Chalo counts Avataar Ventures, LightRock, Raine and Xiaomi among its investors. Chalo has acquired other mobility startups like Vogo and Shuttl.
Prukalpa and Varun had launched “Data for Good” company SocialCops with customers like the UN and India’s National Data Platform.
WaterBridge led the first institutional seed round in 2018 and SocialCops pivoted to build a product in the data management space. Atlan was born in 2020 as a home for data teams in the modern data stack. Marketing and sales focused towards the US with a global development model were architected along with early PMF.
Atlan is often referred to by experts as a “Data Discovery Rocketship”. Atlan’s cloud-native, governance-enabled DataOps platform creates a common collaboration workspace for diverse data consumers like analysts, scientists & business users. Its no-code query builder allows less technical teams to partner with data teams to explore data and allows the data to easily be pulled into analytics and Business Intelligence tools like Tableau & PowerBI. Raised $173 million cumulatively till date, with the latest round being a $105M Series C in 2024, led by GIC, Meritech Capital, with participation from existing investors Salesforce Ventures, PeakXV Partners and Insight Partners.
Pharma science graduates, Raj and Harj ran a pharmacy chain in Canada and IIT Delhi alum and technologist Abhinav had just taken his company Rocket Fuel public on NASDAQ. Together, they made for a formidable founder-market fit with both tech and industry expertise.
WaterBridge led the first institutional seed round in 2019 when they launched PocketPills. They quickly secured a first mover advantage as Canada’s foremost online pharmacy and expanded to five provinces. Raj and Harj’s expertise from building an offline chain of pharmacies made navigating the regulatory maze easier and securing partnerships, early on, with big pharma companies.
PocketPills is the largest digital pharmacy in Canada. They bring a frictionless online pharmacy experience with subscription-driven models, free delivery anywhere in Canada and robotics-driven warehouse automation. Beyond pharma, they provide comprehensive care plans and telemedicine APIs to embed services into products. Raised CAD 35 million with WaterBridge participating in each round since our first.