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New Series - Covering experiences of 50 different VCs. My experience with VCs of India as a deep-tech startup founder. Day 1: 100X VC Greetings everyone, I am a deep-tech startup Co-Founder based in Pune, we established the startup back in 2021 and since have talked to upwards of 50 VCs in India. I want to share my experience and also what to showcase the state of Ecosystem in our Country. As a deep tech startup, heavily focused on Hardware manufacturing my experience has been pretty bad with majority of the VCs in the country. While the money lies with the investors and it's their call to actually invest the funds, I want to share how they take their calls, and how they treat a startup in general. Unfortunately, In India VCs look themselves more like an authoritative figure, similar to bosses in corporates, while it should be more of an even partnership and advisory relationship with startups. Today I'll be starting with 100X VC and my experience with them: We were approached by one of the Investment Analyst at 100X VC via Linkedin, saying they were interested to understand more about the company. We shared our deck over email, gave them a brief about what we are doing, and we received a mail from them saying they were interested to take a call. Now 100X typically invests a maximum of 1Cr at pre defined equity and they do mention they are sector agnostic. We had 3 calls with them all with different set of team members helping them to explain what we were building. Each and every call we had to explain more or less the same thing to new members who were one level senior to the previous member. One of the process in between also involved getting referrals from some senior industry members who would vouch for us. The 3rd call was kept for technology validation and we were validated by 2 year Junior engineers and their first question was "Are you using AI" mind you we are a hardware startup having worked on the technology for past years and bunch on juniors ask us and suggest us that we should use AI in our technology. The final call was with the boss, Sanjay Mehta and some other partners who barely asked any questions, they seem un bothered and after a few weeks we received an e-mail saying "We should be scaling fast and not going step by step for milestones" , again we are a Hardware startup and require machines and area to scale unlike software startups, and that cannot be done in the 1 crore check that they give. Honestly, amongst all the other Investors, I'll rate them as one of the worst experience I've had till now, they were clueless about the sector we were in but wanted to come of as know it all. This is my secondary account for obvious reasons, so people who want please share it on Linkedin, we need to call out the VCs in our ecosystem as well, also this is my personal experience with the startup and the sector I am in, they could be good for some other startups or sector, so please keep that in mind. Not all stories are bad, I have had some good conversations with Investors and would share that as well, I hope Mods dont remove this post and let me post in the future and continue this series. Thanks! Ps: this is not my experience, I am just getting the best content from the internet to Medial.