Why we invested in Piggy Ride!
By: Artha Venture Fund Pr
Tags: Mobility As A Service, Mobility, Kids And Tech, Investors, Venture Capital

Image courtesy: iStock Photos

On the 1st of July 2020 Artha Venture Fund, announced an investment in Piggy Ride. In continuation of our “Why we invested” series, we ask AVF’s partners, Vinod Keni and Anirudh Damani to outline their investment rationale for Piggy Ride.

We at Artha, believe that helping founders understand the rationale behind an investment will demystify “why” we made this investment over the thousands of other opportunities that exist. It should help decide whether we are the right choice for their startup as well as sharpen their next investment pitch.

The blog-post also gives us, as a Venture Capital Fund, a chance to explain Piggy Ride’s value proposition for reaching out to customers.

What is Piggy Ride?

Piggy Ride is a one-stop solution for parents of kids between 2 to 18 years old. Piggy Ride provides mobility solutions for children and schools by leveraging technology and AI/ML tools. They offer tuition fee financing, which enables parents to pay school fees through easy EMIs. Piggy Ride is also developing a discovery platform and marketplace for activities for kids.

Why does Piggy Ride exist?

Vinod Keni (VK): Piggy Ride is a child-focused platform that offers mobility solutions, tuition fee financing, and a marketplace for extra-curricular activities. Piggy Ride launched its mobility solutions in Bengaluru and Delhi before the COVID-19 lockdown and saw impressive traction. Piggy Ride’s solutions address a significant need in the market for safe and secure mobility solutions for children with busy parents and infrastructure issues, easy financing of tuition fees, discovery, and enrolling in extra-curricular activities.

Anirudh Damani (aD): Piggy Ride solves an urban problem. Middle-class Indian parents in urban areas want the overall development of their children, and (now) they have disposable incomes to afford it. What they do not have is “time”.

The average age at which Indians get married has steadily increased in the last couple of decades, and nuclear families are prevalent over joint families with both parents working to keep up with the cost of living in urban areas. Therefore, bringing up a child in these conditions can be quite a task.

Piggy Ride started as an uber-like service but strictly for kids, and it met with incredible launch success in Bangalore and Delhi. However, the founders noticed that they could capture a larger chunk of the parents’ wallets by solving more of their problems. Therefore, Piggy Ride will now offer a stream of services for parents from paying school fees to the booking of classes to education financing options. And let us not forget Piggy Ride will ferry the children too!

They will be the one-stop solution that every parent has been dreaming about!

Why did we invest in Piggy Ride?

VK: As an early-stage investor, we look for scalable businesses that are solving a big problem and are leveraging technology to do so. Piggy Ride has checked off all these boxes. Another criterion for the investment is the founder and the team. Manish Tewari has previously founded and exited two successful ventures. Manish’s focus on scaling up, nimbleness, and execution were crucial factors in our decision to invest in Piggy Ride. It has also attracted blue-chip investors like Jafco, who will continue to invest and support Piggy Ride in subsequent rounds, making fundraising easier. The market for children’s mobility is mostly untapped and enormous in India. Expanding the platform to include tuition fee financing and extra-curricular activities demonstrated the founder’s and the company’s ability to adapt to trends in a post-Corona world.

A focused execution, along with technology-enabled solutions, a large and growing addressable market, and a successful serial entrepreneur, is a potent mix that has the potential to deliver blockbuster returns!

aD: As a personal investor in parent or children focused platforms like BabyChakra, FindUrClass, CarveNiche, Rank Junction, and so on, I believe in Manish’s assessment that there is an LTV of ₹80 lakh — ₹1 crore in rearing a child from age 2 to 18. This space gets fragmented with a host of apps that all cater to a specific problem, but none that wholistically solve it, but Manish wanted Piggy Ride to exactly do that. Our alignment on how we saw the space and Manish’s clarity on how to solve these pertinent issues were the most critical factors in my decision to make this investment.

The founding team’s successful entrepreneurial background was necessary, but it was a distant second.

What did we like about the Piggy Ride founders? What sets them apart?

VK: In early-stage businesses, founders make a big difference between the success and failures of an enterprise. Hence, while evaluating investments in early-stage businesses, the quality and capability of the founder are very important to me. In some cases, it is more important than the product or the solution. Manish Tewari, the founder of Piggy Ride, has the qualities of a successful entrepreneur. His relentless focus on execution, the ability to quickly adapt to market and refine the offering were qualities that I liked. Though he has founded and exited two successful companies, he is still humble and grounded in reality. This quality is also equally important, especially if you are a serial entrepreneur.

His passion for building a business around an enormous problem that isn’t addressed, and based on personal experiences has attracted customers, partners, and investors. I liked the fact that he was able to raise a large amount of seed capital on an idea from experienced investors and quickly went about developing the solution and taking it to market.

He has a well-articulated vision and the focus to attain it. His ability to quickly add additional features and solutions due to the lockdown indicated his willingness to experiment. In my opinion, founders who ask and get feedback from customers will attain more success, and this a quality that Manish possesses.

I like capital-efficient businesses, and Manish is building one. He is frugal, and as investors, I find this to be an essential quality. He is scrappy and willing to get in the trenches. On top of this, his ability to attract global investors, who typically invest in later stages, to back him at the early stage demonstrated his capabilities, which we, as investors, liked very much.

At Artha, we want to support passionate entrepreneurs who are focused on building scalable businesses and are, besides, frugal, scrappy, and visionary. Manish and Piggy Ride matched these requirements.

How can we add value to Piggy Ride?

VK: Artha Venture Fund will add significant value to Piggy Ride. As Manish and his team build the platform, we can help them with key connects to schools, daycare centers, activity centers, and financing partners. We have been helping with connects to partners and experts like Activity Hero for their activity marketplace, and with schools for their tuition financing offering. Piggy Ride will also benefit from our financial management expertise. We can help with KPI measurement, pricing strategies, partnerships, and building a sustainable, profitable enterprise.

We can also help with recruitment and team building and aid them with potential partnerships in other markets, as the potential for the platform is universal. Artha can also provide Piggy Ride with potential next round investors, who are global along with multiple M&A opportunities.

Where do we see Piggy Ride five years from now?

VK: Piggy Ride will be an evolving and growing platform that will serve the changing needs of children and the ecosystem that includes schools, child-care centers, activity centers, and others, financing, fitness, health, etc. Piggy Ride will expand its offerings and offer tailored solutions for children in tier 2 & tier 3 towns, thereby becoming truly a pan-India platform. This scale can be of significant value to organizations and suppliers that target this market and are looking at a pan-India market. Piggy Ride can achieve these goals while being supported by investors, including Artha.

aD: Serving 10 lakh (1 million) parents with an average annual spend of ₹7 lakh per annum. That is my vision for Piggy Ride!