ShopClues' Sandeep Aggarwal has Rs 20 crore for private investments

MUMBAI: Sandeep Aggarwal, the founder of Droom and ShopClues, is seeking to establish himself as an entrepreneur-investor with a family office as well as a corpus nearly seven times his startup investments last year. Aggarwal has earmarked Rs 20 crore for personal investments in nine-twelve startups this year.Once the family office is incorporated, it is likely that all investments will be routed through it, Aggarwal said.

"In the last two years, I have been investing in a rather random and chaotic manner. This setting aside of capital as an investment amount is an evolution from that to a more streamlined exercise," Aggarwal said, adding that the family office will be ready by May.

Aggarwal, who invested Rs 3 crore across seven startups in 2016, is looking to tap the Southeast Asian market. His investments last year went into Wydr, Shopsity, Curo Healthcare, Dekoruma, Data Guise, Give Club and Duriana, of which only the first three are Indian entities.


Aggarwal said he will scout for startups working in the areas of healthcare, technology, retail, and data science application development and also those in small cities and towns. The entrepreneur-investor said he is not restricting his investment corpus for this year to Rs 20 crore.

"If the market recovery turns out to be better than expected, I will increase the size of the corpus. If I reach a situation where I believe Rs 20 crore is not enough, that would be a good problem to have. I want to be in that situation," he said.

Aggarwal said he is also in talks with three venture capital funds to invest in them as a limited partner. He declined to name the funds or the amount he plans to invest in them. For all this thrust on investments, Aggarwal insisted that his role as an investor would not supersede his role as an entrepreneur.

Aggarwal's entire focus presently is on Droom, his second startup.

He has not been actively involved in ShopClues since 2013, when he handed over the reins to his wife Radhika Aggarwal following charges of insider trading in the US. This month, he accused his wife of pushing him out of ShopClues and fraudulently stripping him of his voting rights in the company.

"Droom is my bread and butter," Aggarwal said. "I am not looking to create another venture capital fund. I am putting my money where my passion is."