Kaval Kaur is a co-founder of SUFI, an incubator and angel investment company with offices in the USA and India. Kaval and her husband Jasveer co-founded Virsa, which was later acquired by SAP for a few hundred million dollars. Virsa is part of SAP’s Governance, Risk and Compliance business unit. I caught up with Kaval at the TiECon 2007 in Silicon Valley, where she was one of the master of ceremonies for the two-day event. I wanted to find out Kaval’s journey as an entrepreneur and how it all started.
In our conversation, Kaval outlines how her journey began. Founded in 1999 as a services company, Kaval and Jasveer had to change the course of their business midstream after the dotcom collapse and 9/11. Pushed to refocus and reinvent Virsa became a product company focusing on a niche market: security and compliance in the ERP space. How did they do that? What were the challenges they had to face? And how did they end up getting Venture Capital money? Why were VCs calling them?
Part-1 of the interview:
Part-2 of the interview:
Kaval and Jasvir are two people with great knowledge,experience and the ability to forecast. Which made Sufi a great company to work in.
Sufi in jasvir’s words,a group of A++ people.
Rajesh…yes Kaval and her husband will be working with entrepreneurs in SIlicon Valley and in India.
Jaspreet…I think Sufi is willing to look at funding startups at a really early stage, which most VCs in India don’t do. From what I have seen, heard and found out…many VCs in India tend to fund companies when they are in revenue stream and have a sizeble client list…when they have a viable business model then VCs tend to fund them. Check out the the VC funding trend for yourself. There are of course those few exceptions or outliers that don’t find the trend when it comes to VC funding in India.
Thanks for reading and sharing your views.
kamla
Interesting. But, like most other VCs .. looks like SUFI also funds only early stage (at least the website and portfolio says so).
@kamla, great intverview … good job 🙂
Kaval has an important role to play by really lending a helpinh hand to the emerging entrepreneurs in India, who need support and guidance, apart from venture capital funding.