Bangalore: Few people believe in ‘giving’ more than in ‘receiving’. This value is what made Pallav Nadhani, don the role of an angel investor.  Nadhani, who is the Founder and CEO of FusionCharts, along with Abhishek Rungta, the Founder & CEO of Indusnet Technologies has founded a seed fund, Seeders Venture Capital, which has invested in eight startups in the past 18 months.

“I am still an entrepreneur, and am fully engrossed with FusionCharts. Seeders is what I do during my free time, or during the weekends. It is my way to give it back to the industry. Me and Abhishek both hail from Kolkata and felt a huge gap between the investors and the entrepreneurs, regarding funding. Eventually we moved to the national platform and since then have closed eight deals.” says Nadhani.

Nadhani founded FusionCharts in 2002 as a data visualization component for generating dynamic Flash and JavaScript charts, which can be embedded in web and desktop applications. It now has more than 19,000 customers and 400,000 users in over 110 countries, which include many Fortune 500 companies. The company was bootstrapped, and still is.

Seeders Venture Capital likes to invest in companies which have a have a unique value proposition even if they are targeting a market with existing players and find it better if they have a prototype ready. Their area of interest is software, games, Saas, and mobile application, where Internet is an enabler. “All our portfolio companies exhibit the aforementioned parameters and hence we closed eight companies in a span of 18 months.”

The investments include: Shopo.in, which sells handicrafts online, Plivo, a cloud telephony platform, Azoi, which is building an advanced tablet for gaming and entertainment that supports gesture recognition and HDMI projections, Eduora, an online social learning environment, and Cropex Technologies, which provides web-based solutions for farm to form trace-ability, online farm management, and GlobalGap certification. Seeders has also invested in CarSingh, which is an online platform to help users buy and sell used and new cars; Capricorn Gifting, a corporate gifting firm; and iDubba, a recommendation engine for television channels in India.

The venture firm is mentoring its portfolio companies to scale up their operations, hire additional members, and contribute to their product roadmap, when required. It focuses only on the technology sector, essentially any business where it feels it can add value, and not just bring in the money. It has invested in only one pure-play ecommerce company and the others do not fall into that bracket.

“From an investment perspective, we have taken a small pause till the mid of this year, to be able to focus on existing companies. We would look forward to investing in the second half of the year,” adds Nadhani.