Saurabh Kumar

Expert Evaluator, Rapporteur and External Observer

2024 - Current

Expert evaluator of European sustainable urban mobility startups. Evaluated startups for their last 3 batches as an external evaluator. Contributed to Investment Committees.

Proprietor

2020

Global Climate Tech or Impact Venture Investments and Startups Consultancy. Past clients include companies like: Katapult VC (Ocean, Climate, Africa), EIT Urban Mobility, Bestseller Foundation, Charge Incubator, Ocean Bottle, Batx Energies, Pascal Technologies, Byewaste, etc Email: iamsaurabh.kr@gmail.com

Startup Mentor and Speaker

2022

Speaker & Mentor: Conduct workshops on fundraising, due diligence, and data rooms for early-stage startups. Mentored many immigrant startup founders at the ideation stage in Oslo.

Investments and Strategy Consultant: Sub-Saharan Africa

2024 - 2025

Focused on impact investments in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a particular emphasis on climate, the future of work, e-commerce, and logistics. Leveraging my experience across both developing and developed markets, I played a key role in redefining the foundation’s impact investment strategy. My work encompassed industry and sector research, investment strategy development, fund modelling, portfolio strategy and management, and impact strategy formulation.

Senior Investment Associate

2022 - 2024

Leading investments end-to-end in climate tech startups from around the world. Including Interviews, Due Diligence, Research and Analysis (both qualitative and quantitative), Portfolio Construction, Fund Modelling, Reference Checks, Negotiations, Investment Memos, Investment Committees, Term Sheets, and Investment Agreements. Direct manager of scouting team, deal-flow analysts, and investment analysts. Trained many and managed team of 6. Moreover, actively worked on portfolio reporting, fund modelling, portfolio structuring, etc. Also, worked with cross functional and cross cultural teams: Artifical Intelligence for dealflow, Africa and Mauritius team etc

Investment Associate

2021 - 2022

Objective owner of one of the 5 OKRs of Katapult — attract and invest in the best impact startups. Overachieved multiple KRs, and achieved 97% of the very ambitious objective while the target was to reach a minimum of 70%. A core part of Katapult’s expansion in Mauritius and Rwanda. Trained the new employees to set up a well-defined selection process and helped them with investment analysis.

Senior Investment Analyst / Investment associate

2021 - 2022

Leading and managing the deal flow process. Leading a team of scouts in the Oslo office, and guiding a team of scouts in the Mauritius and Rwanda office. Interviewed the founders/CxOs to analyse and understand their business, tech, and impact case and analyse the potential match of a company with our accelerator program. Have interviewed 300+ teams of founders/CxOs already. Single-handedly developed a plug-in tool to increase the scouting efficiency of the company manifold. Helped develop Artificial Intelligence to aid the selection process and make data-driven investment decisions.

Investment Analyst / Lead startup scout

2020 - 2021

Analysed the long-run strategic fit of impact tech startups. Co-managed the business due-diligence process. Strategic partnerships, deal sourcing, screening, and due diligence of the startups working on the UN Sustainable Development Goals and making a positive impact in the world. Innovated the whole deal sourcing process; formulated, developed, and managed a new scouting automation tool increasing the operational efficiency manifold.

Startup scout / Dealflow analyst

2020 - 2021

Researched the technology trends and market opportunities related to climate change (UNSDGs: 7, 11, 12, 13, 14) to combine the literature and human analysis while making the investment decision. Reviewed multiple thousand impact tech companies. Scouted 1000+ climate tech companies in the pipeline (got an informal title of scouting machine :p).

Investment Banking Consultant

2024 - 2024

Helped with impact fundraising strategy and connecting with impact investors.

Investment Banking Consultant

2023 - 2023

Helped with impact fundraising strategy

Advisory Board Member

2022 - 2023

Strategy Advisor

2021 - 2022

Strategy Intern

2020 - 2021

Due to the world's drive towards both social and environmental sustainability, Indo Naturals has a significant market potential for consumer goods. Utilizing experiences and knowledge gained from both developing and developed parts of the world, I worked on creating an efficient supply chain and an optimal business model solution for the global expansion to assure economies of scale and economies of scope.

Startup Mentor

2022 - 2023

Investment Banking Consultant

2022 - 2022

Helped with impact fundraising strategy