Seeding Start-ups, Shaping Innovations: Meet India's Most Active Angel Investors

As India's start-up ecosystem matures and investors look at new avenues, angel funding is increasingly coming to the forefront. Angel investors literally handhold entrepreneurs, right from when a start-up is incepted to the period when it gains enough traction to raise series A funding from venture funds.

The number of angel investments in India has been in a rise. The VCCedge data table on the right indicates rising interest in angel activity, and also more and more deals are now disclosed.

As a tribute to this rising trend, VCCircle picks 15 hottest and most prominent angel investors in India. These angels have been actively investing in the Indian market at least for the past three years and most of them have at least half a dozen investments each to their credit if not more. The very active investors have even made over two dozen investments. While this is nowhere close to Silicon Valley superangels like Reid Hoffman and Ron Conway, one must remember that the Indian angel market is relatively young and still growing.

We have also profiled angels to watch out for. They have started investing/evaluating companies over the past one year, and could be active investors in the years to come.

The list has been prepared by talking to angel investing groups, venture capitalists, angels themselves and entrepreneurs. They are not mentioned in any particular order. Also this is not an exhaustive listing so we may have left out other active angel investors. Comments are welcome.

The Mirchandanis Deepak Shahdadpuri Ranjan Kapur Praveen Chakravarty Rajan Anandan Rehan Yar Khan Mukund Mohan Ashish Gupta Gopal Srinivasan Sunil Kalra Rajesh Sawhney Anand Ladsariya Praveen Gupta Sharad Sharma Vishal Gondal

ANGELS TO WATCH