Gemba Capital 2018 Year In Review
By: Adith Podhar
Tags: Venture Capital, Angel Investing, Capital, Review, Portfolio

Part I — Portfolio

Happy New Year to all !!

2018 was our first full year of operations. Technically we did start from August 2017 but most of our investment thesis evolved as we progressed in 2018. It was a fantastic year which would not have been possible without the people who have been a part of our journey. A special thanks to all of them.

Resicare, our first investment focuses on the affordable home healthcare segment. The home healthcare market is expected to be $6.2 bn by 2020 in India. Despite many players, we feel Resicare has the best team to execute on the ground and have already delivered 1 mn + service hours.

We focused on startups solving India specific problems in a unique way irrespective of whether such a model exists in the US or China. We invested in MyHQ, which is solving the workspace problem for non-funded startups, freelancers and field employees in NCR. MyHQ has strong tech, platform play and a loyal engaged community of members. Currently, MyHQ has 90+ locations in NCR itself.

ClearDekho, our third investment is an offline ‘budget’ optical retail chain in India. It followed the Online 2 Offline model and is growing fast through the franchise route with 36 operational stores. India is the blind capital of the world and the market is hugely underpenetrated especially in tier-II, III and IV cities. ClearDekho added 21 stores in the last 6 months. Post our funding, ClearDekho also raised funds from SOSV-MOX China Accelerator.

Hoi Foods, provides quality and standardized “ready to heat and eat” food under the Hoi brand to in-room dining guests of budget hotels in India and operates cloud kitchens to serve the B2C segment through online delivery partners. Hoi is solving the ‘Food’ problem of budget travelers in a way similar to OYO solving the ‘accommodation’ problem for budget travelers. Hoi is already serving >2500 rooms in NCR alone!

We then invested in Zestl, a Pune based B2B SaaS startup that is building a no-code cognitive automation platform to power complex enterprise workflows. An UC/Stanford alumnus, Hardik has earlier worked on advanced technology development at Apple and Texas Instruments in the Bay Area. Along with him, the Zestl founding team brings in 60+ years of international work experience, with over 30 patents to their name. Their client list includes names like Dominos and the Future Group.

Our sixth investment was Khidki, a hyperlocal vernacular social media app for the small towns of India. In India, culture and interest changes every 100 km hence a platform with hyperlocal content be it video, photo or text is vital to scale. The team has developed proprietary AI based dialect recognition tech which identifies different dialects of Gujarati, Hindi and Rajasthani and the corresponding location of the content. Khidki currently has over 4 lakh users from Gujarat and it recently launched in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.

Our next investment in Fintech space is not yet announced. It digitally lends a small proportion of salary as advance to the Emerging Bharat.

Our last committed investment for 2018 is a startup in the SaaS space. It streamlines and automates Business Finance Operations on one unified platform.