“GVFL has been at the forefront of ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat' long before the word was coined”

There are a lot of disruptions happening in the entire segment of the economy in these critical times. Please elaborate the kind of crises you faced and what has been the impact of Covid and lockdown?

In the last few years, we have seen major business disruptions happening due to cheap internet and smartphone penetration. With the technological innovations, the innovators are playing a disrupting role in the economy. With the advent of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, these tokens are being unofficially used as a currency without Government or central bank oversights. Such disruptions were never thought of before.

But Crypto’s aside, we see that technology is playing a disrupting role in medical, defense, education, finance and almost all other activities. At GVFL our intention has been and continues to be to support entrepreneurs who are disrupting the industry for a larger good. If the technology is scalable to better the lives of millions of people, we are ever ready to make an investment.

To answer your second part, Covid and Lockdown did create a lot of uncertainties with us as well as in our investee companies. By the grace of God, none of our employees or the entrepreneurs of the investee companies were affected severely by Covid. During Covid induced lockdown, our major emphasis to our investee companies was to preserve cash. This was not a major worry because as an investment thesis we do not invest in cash burn business models, but we still had our eyes on the cash component in every business. A couple of our investee companies that were under change of business plans ran out of cash, but we were quick to do follow on investments into these companies.

Please let us know how the journey began 30 years ago?