First, the $100m series D round Zoomcar is trying to raise a big step down from the $500m it was targeting last April, reflecting the dampening of entrepreneur expectations since last year in China, India and other countries.
Second, the vehicle (sorry for the pun!) being used reflects the sophistication of many of the better corporate venturing units. Sony and Japanese financial services firm Daiwa Capital Holdings established Innovation Growth Ventures Corporation (IGV) as one of Sony’s venture investment programs.
The catchily-named Sony Innovation Fund by IGV that invested in Zoomcar has other outside investors but tries to marry the strengths of independent VCs on financial returns with the added-value strengths the best corporate investors can bring and under Gen Tsuchikawa and Austin Noronha has a strong team to achieve this goal.
It will be great to catch up with both Tsuchikawa and Noronha at next week’s GCVI Summit.com as part of a 50-plus delegation coming from Japanese companies to California and reflecting the increasingly-important ties between the two countries as the geopolitical landscape continues to evolve with China’s economic rise. (Note, the final tranche of tickets to the summit have been released before the event reaches capacity likely by the weekend.)
Third, the tech space Zoomcar is in is interesting. Founded by a couple of Americans living in India, Zoomcar already had a who’s who of angel and corporate backers, such as Ford, Mahindra and NGP Capital, and is tapping into subscription-based car ownership and wants to rate the cars being driven to presumably sell the information back to car makers similar to how the JD Power survey works in the US. Zoomcar’s primary target, however, is to have more than one million vehicles on road in 18 to 24 months.
Fourth, and hopefully, as Zoomcar was the first car rental company in India to offer electric vehicles, the Mahindra REVA E2O and the Ford EcoSport back in the day, more of these million cars will be powered from the grid and ease the pollution that means 10 of the top 11 cities globally for poor air quality are in the country.
