Apohan Corporate Consultants Private Limited

Introduction to Apohan: Apohan is a three-year-old old fintech start-up based in Pune, Maharashtra, India into online equity funding & related enabling strategic consulting services for SMEs. It is not into any statutory services governed by a regulating authority. Need of our services: An equity investment in a "well-screened" SME business is one of the most attractive investment options in terms of risk-return profile for an investment corpus between INR 10 Cr to 400 Cr (USD 3 to 120 Mn). There are deep-rooted misconceptions among many investors regarding high risks nature SME investments. However, these aren't actual business risks but more of risk perceptions in the absence of business information and documentation & inconvenience from poor seller representation. On the other hand, deserving SMEs need equity funding and can't fulfil their growth or turnaround needs with internal accruals or debt. Despite huge demand-supply voltage gap, equity funding deals can be said to be absent in SME space. The most important culprit for this absence is lack of an efficient, economic & reliable consulting infrastructure in transaction & strategy space. Innovation element: Out of the 2150 fintech companies in India, at the most 10 might be in the equity/transaction space, i.e., deal database, VDR & deal brokerage. There is no equity funding or transaction delivery platform company in the whole world, let alone India. The number of reasons that can be attributed to the various stakeholders in the ecosystem for virtual absence of strategic transactions in SME space could run into hundreds. We can overcome most of these problems with a single platform. Technology for disruption: The process flow in the offline transactions is unscientific and non-standard resulting in unacceptable failure rate. The success ratio for queries for equity funding in SMEs is 10,000:1. Using emerging-technologies for business data collection, for data analysis to prepare first-level deliverables, for screening to select the right stakeholders and for communication, the complex transaction process can be automated to the extent of 75% in the beginning itself. We have a 250-page technology plan and the product would be ever-evolving for next 7-8 years. Marketing: Inbound marketing strategy educating businesses on awareness of equity as a business funding option, on removal of misconceptions related to strategic transactions, and on the complex, costly & lengthy process of equity funding would create a vast demand from 63 million MSMEs in India alone. Currently, the company has 2000-page marketing website containing all practical knowledge for SMEs on corporate management, financial management, contractual management, and transaction management which needs to converted into easy media. Videos and events have proven to be very effective in the past. Competition: We serve businesses within the revenue range of INR 25 Cr to 250 Cr (approx. USD 3 Mn to 30 Mn). We do only sell-side advisory as the gap exist only in that place. If we ignore the exact value proposition for a moment, our competitors are compliance firms (CA, CS, etc), a few investment banks into SMEs, local non-technical strategic consulting firms, and a wide variety of brokers posing themselves as transaction consultants to an uninitiated technocrat SME promoter. The brokerage platforms can be treated as our competitors for the networking element of transaction delivery process which constitutes maximum 5% of the total work as they are not obligated for transaction delivery. They work as a SAAS platform. Revenue model: Our major revenue will be in the form of success fees of transactions. Milestone-based fees before success for transactions, fees from long-term time-based strategic consulting services and fees from short-term strategic educational services constitute our main revenue streams. We conduct a very rigorous client screening process to ensure near 100% success of a transaction. Unlike other fintech companies, the model can be easily replicated internationally as the basic elements of strategy are same across the globe. Even if a very small fraction of the target market is tapped in a timeframe of 10-15 years, the revenue will be in billions of dollars. We aspire to close 100 deals/day by this time as against the current 150 deals/annum by the world leader today. Proof of concept (POC): We have surveyed 900 SMEs, mostly in-person, to evolve this business model. I have a lead book of 186 prospective clients as of June 2021. However, we have signed only 6 contracts looking at our limited capability to deliver in physical mode. On revenue front, we are at early revenue stage. On product front, we are at pre-prototype stage. We are nearing closure of one transaction and in this course, we have created all the documentation from the perspective of taking them online. We have developed a very wide network of ecosystem stakeholders on various physical and social-media forums. Attachments: Pitch deck presentation Executive summary of business plan