Moneybags Who Shun A Ferrari

The Inventus Capital India team prefers to keep it simple, both in life and in their investments.

- Sayan Chakraborty

Talk about the perceived high life of venture capital (VC) executives and Parag Dhol, managing director at Inventus Capital India, will cut you short. “We have delayed gratification ourselves. Look around and you will know,” says Dhol.

This may sound a bit like braggadocio, but Dhol and his colleagues at Inventus Capital’s India unit—Samir Kumar and Rutvik Doshi—are known to shun ostentation. Such is their aversion to grandstanding that walls of the firm’s office, a no-frill setup in a quaint Bengaluru neighbourhood, are bereft of even a single plaque trumpeting their marquee investments.

And there isn’t a dearth of them. In fact, Inventus Capital was among the first VC firms to taste blood in an exit-starved country like India with the sale of bus ticketing portal redBus to the Ibibo Group for $100 million in 2013. It walked away with approximately $25 million, about 10 times the money invested. It is an investor in Etechaces Marketing and Consulting, which runs the PolicyBazaar and PaisaBazaar portals, the latest homegrown consumer internet startup to enter the unicorn club.

The team at Inventus is on a hunt for entrepreneurs who have delayed gratification with dogged determination, as more often than not such founders run a tight ship than a leaking boat. “Over the years, I have believed that one key criterion for an entrepreneur to succeed is the ability to delay gratification. They know it will take time (to build a business) and are willing to wait that long and not look for a quick flip,” says Dhol. Avers Doshi, “This holds good for us as well. Look at the cars that we drive.”