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Eva Yazhari
General Partner, Beyond Capital Ventures |
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Eva Yazhari is a seasoned investor, conscious entrepreneur, leading author, and the CEO and founder of Beyond Capital Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund offering a diversified portfolio of purpose-driven companies in "need-to-have" sectors, led by conscious leaders in Africa and India.
Having launched her career going up the ranks in Wall Street, working alongside top hedge fund managers in NYC and raising over $5B, Eva integrated her passion for finance and investing with her values of abundance, purpose and meaning, and love for social justice, inclusion and progress. Through structural innovation, Eva is pioneering equity and power transformation in venture capital in her fund.
Today, in addition to expanding Beyond Capital - which already impacts the lives of over 50+ million people – Eva educates both seasoned professionals and new investors on the power of impact investing. In 2021, Eva released her first book, The Good Your Money Can Do, a powerful playbook for anyone who is looking to not only create a life that is rich through investing, but one rich in meaning. As the host of The Beyond Capital Podcast, she's interviewed over 80 purpose-driven leaders to shed light on their professional and personal stories, all of whom have helped to expand and promote the idea of "conscious investing." She has been recognized in various media vehicles, including Entrepreneur, Forbes, goop, Impact Alpha, SOCAP, Thrive Global, Toniic, Cheddar TV and Ventureburn.
Eva splits her time between Dallas and Los Angeles with her husband, Hooman, and their precious children, Alessandro and Aurelia. Her family has deep roots and ties in Tanzania and Kenya.
Listen to Eva's Life Story and Personal Mission in her own words here: https://www.behindherempire.com/episode/eva-yazhari
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1 As a leading impact investor, Beyond Capital Ventures focuses on
nurturing early-stage businesses addressing the needs of emerging
consumers. Could you help us understand your current portfolio in India?
What are the major sectors or segments across which your Indian portfolio
is distributed?
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Our Indian portfolio caters to the agriculture, e-commerce for last mile access, financial inclusion and autonomous drone logistics industries. The companies are as follows:
- FreshR (Delhi): a B2B agritech platform that aims to capture the $50 billion
domestic fish and meat market as a one-stop shop for distributors; hotels,
restaurants and cafes (HORECA); exporters and institutional buyers.
- Frontier Markets (Jaipur): a last-mile social commerce platform that creates an
‘Easy Life’ (‘Saral Jeevan’) for households in rural villages by connecting them to
necessary products and services through leveraging female marketing affiliates
(‘Sahelis’).
- Lal10 (Delhi): a rapidly growing B2B e-commerce platform featuring
predominantly female artisans, connecting Indian textiles and home goods to the
world.
- Redwing Labs (Bangalore): creates and operates unmanned aerial vehicles to
automate last-mile healthcare supply chain delivery, ensuring fast and affordable
life-saving medical supplies for everyone who needs it.
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2 How does Beyond Capital Ventures support and add value to its portfolio companies beyond capital investment?
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We invest in our companies not just through equity and debt, but also through our
communities, networks, and time. In 2022 we formalized our Expert Advisory Council, a
consortium of industry experts who provide pro-bono consulting services to our portfolio
companies. Through the services provided both prior to and after the formalization of
the Council, we have deployed $2.3 million in pro bono services to date across our
portfolio companies, delivering streamlined sector-specific and strategic expertise. We
curate bespoke content for our portfolio company leaders that’s tailored to their unique
geographies, markets, and business needs. For instance, in June 2023 we hosted a Founder Summer School, a half-day of content with eight incredible speakers for our
founders focused on topics like finding your business archetype to achieve market
penetration, creating a bulletproof pre-Series B operations strategy, and building a
stellar team for a startup environment. We also offer an innovative ownership structure
(Equitable Venture) that aims to minimize extraction for our founders. For portfolio
companies that meet designated impact and gender performance criteria, founders can
become owners in our fund and are eligible for carry. We are one of the few venture
capital firms that operates with such a model.
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3 Can you give us some examples of successful investments made by Beyond Capital Ventures in India, and what made these companies stand out?
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One of our superstar portfolio companies is Lal10, a fair-trade B2B design-to-deliver
model for fashion and home textiles. Lal10 has grown rapidly in the last 18 months,
fueled by India surpassing China as the #1 global manufacturing hub. The company has
sourced incredible products from nearly 3,000 artisans across India, of which 65% are
women. The company has scaled quickly with customers such as Zara, Home Goods,
Uniqlo, Muji, and Crate & Barrel. We were immediately drawn to the team, which is led
by Maneet Gohil and Sanchit Govil. With both having strong operating backgrounds in
companies such as Flipkart, they have been with the firm since the beginning and have
remained dedicated to the business throughout, making empathy and humility a
cornerstone of the company culture.
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4 How does Beyond Capital Ventures measure and track the impact of its portfolio companies beyond financial returns?
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We have a robust impact measurement and management system in place, rooted in a
strong awareness of the intersectional nature of the need-to-have sectors we invest in.
This approach broadens the scope of our impact strategy and has allowed us to deepen
our impact methodology to capture climate, gender, last mile access and conscious
leadership metrics going forward. Our process allows us to accurately evaluate the
trade-offs and unintended consequences of our impact footprint.
We incorporate a wide range of reporting metrics at both the portfolio and company
level. Our choice of metrics comes from our team's individual company assessment and
external standards including GIIN's IRIS and GenderSmart gender metrics. We have
established a strong gender benchmarking process whereby we measure gender
metrics in each geography (India and East Africa) against regional benchmarks. Our
Director of Social Impact and our Investment Associates work with each portfolio company to define an Impact Theory of Change for the business and articulate a
strategy for Impact Measurement and Management. We gather these metrics through a
Conscious Leadership Questionnaire that founders fill out during the Due Diligence
process pre-investment, the Quarterly Impact Reporting of our portfolio companies
post-investment, and an Annual Impact Survey of portfolio company founders that
highlights qualitative data and customer success stories.
Applying a stakeholder capitalism lens, our analysis not only measures the impact of
core services or products on target customers, but it also quantifies engagement with
and impact on other stakeholders including staff, partners, public sector organizations,
and investors.
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5 What are your views on the impact investing market in India? How does it
compare with other emerging markets where you invest in? Could you
share Beyond Capital Venture’s investment strategy in India for the
calendar year 2023?
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Multiple factors give us confidence in India’s investment opportunities, not only for the
remainder of 2023 but beyond. As the fastest-growing major world economy today per
the IMF, we have a strong sense of conviction in the nation’s economic profile. We see
the service sector in particular holds a large opportunity for SaaS business models as
this industry contributes to over 50% of the country’s GDP. India is also emerging as a
manufacturing power with the industry output ranking sixth largest globally, per our
investment in Lal10.
We view the Indian economy in three buckets: the sub-5% of households who earn over
$40K (“India 1”); the 55% of households who earn between $5-$40K (“India 2”), and the
40% of households who earn under $5K (“India 3”). We are observing strong growth in
India 2 consumers, who are projected to capture 78% of the market. India 3, which
mostly covers small town India or “long tail India,” is also of interest to us given both the
strong impact potential and growing momentum. We are seeing growing startup activity
in long tail India as attractive social security benefits and government investment
galvanize startup activity in the region. We are also monitoring climate opportunities in
the nation. Slowly but steadily, India’s renewables growth and vehicle electrification is
catching the attention of investors. Our recent engagements revealed that there is
anecdotal interest within the venture capital ecosystem to set up targeted funds and
platforms to focus on climate and its intersection with gender, health and livelihoods. We
look forward to exploring these themes actively looking ahead.
As an investor in Africa as well, we see the two markets as being complementary. While
India is a decade or more ahead of Africa in some ways, African start-ups are tackling
some challenges (such as financial services) very differently than Indian start-ups. For example, with the rails of mobile money via major Telecoms being established over the
last two decades, African start-ups have been able to leverage this to rapidly market
additional services such as buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) and digital health offerings. We
do see India serve as a strong model for certain sectors like climate and mobility that
our African investment team takes into consideration during our due diligence and
investment analysis process.
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