Building higher revenue and achieving financial growth doesn’t happen overnight, but it can occur rapidly with the right investment strategy and partner. McLaren Strategic Ventures, a top investment firm, and scale-up accelerator aims to shift the investment paradigm by combining capital with key management infrastructure and services, enabling entrepreneurs to rapidly scale up in the digital world. Accelerating time to market for never-thought-possible innovations is where leadership and partnerships provide strength to enterprises looking to take the next step in corporate growth.
Turbocharging Valuation
Historically, increasing company valuations to the billion dollar mark has been a decades-long endeavor. For example, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway holding company took 60 years to reach $300 billion in revenue and $600 billion in valuation. With emerging technologies, McLaren Strategic Ventures aims to follow the Berkshire Hathaway model but accelerate the timeline multifold for numerous companies in their ecosystem.
Providing businesses the ability to grow exponentially is McLaren Strategic Ventures’ primary goal in the coming years, and it’s looking for new and emerging partners to help fulfill its mandate. Technology startups operating with the right financial backing and business operational support can build revenue not possible through traditional investment and growth strategies.
McLaren’s model has a proven track record of condensing the timeline for rapid growth and success. A case in point is Warehouse Now (WHN), founded by Tarun Saraf, WHN’s business model includes complex digital tech platforms, skilled manpower, end-to-end logistics, reporting and analytics to connect the supply chain and warehouses to businesses. Mr. Saraf realized the complexity of his business would require more than financial capital to get this multifaceted operation off the ground.
Finding an investor who understood WHN’s core value proposition was essential to prepare for strategic scale and success while introducing WHN to senior decision makers across the public and private sector. WHN needed a chief architect, solution design, and development team to make headway in the complex world of global warehousing and supply chain management.
Working with McLaren Strategic Ventures, WHN brought their idea to reality, converting capex intensive, highly inefficiently utilized real estate warehouse assets to opex-based, just-in-time, highly efficient supply chain management assets.
Today, with a scaled-up model of the comprehensive intelligent digital platform, Warehouse Now provides mission-critical needs to 21 industries including pharmaceutical, food, manufacturing, retailing and logistics, servicing millions of consumers, across thousands of locations. Warehouse Now has grown 400% year on year in just 10months, multiplying revenues by 10 times in 10 months.
An Investor/Operator Mindset Can Open New Markets
Experienced investors with a background in creating catalysts for growth can do more than just market products. They can open new markets, especially in industries where markets are created instead of expanded. The tech industry is famous for opening new doors through innovation rather than reinventing the wheel. Think of the ways technology has changed in the last decade. Many of the latest products and services on the market were never before defined, and it was through the right strategy and business operations that made it possible.
For example, Uvik, a start-up transforming digital payments in India through a contactless mobile payment interface, specific domain insights, and access both into the local and global payments markets, needed help to sharpen their business plan assumptions and validation of their technology roadmap.
Uvik worked with McLaren to market closed-loop prepaid wallets over NFC while marketing the potential to bring massive amounts of unbanked customers into a formal digital payment ecosystem.
Today, Uvik’s systems have revolutionized the future of payments for bill payments, restaurants, transportation, entertainment stores, and retail locations, without any additional devices meeting the same multifold successes. That’s made possible by combining capital, operations, and technologies in unique ways, with an investor-operator mindset.
UST Global Veteran Takes on Venture Capital
Sajan Pillai, CEO and Managing Partner for Season Two Ventures and Founder-Chairman of McLaren Strategic Ventures, has a long and illustrious career in financial investments across digital businesses. Sajan, a global leader in digital transformation and co-founder of UST Global -- later known as UST, valued at more than $1 billion – rapidly scaled the business with just 20 employees to more than 25,000 employees and compound annual growth of more than 30%. Pillai maintained his position until 2019 when he decided to form Season Two Ventures, a $100 million fund investing in about 30 early-stage technology companies in healthcare, fintech, retail, energy, and utilities.
Soon after forming Season Two Ventures, Pillai and his team realized the traditional venture capital model was not adequate for many of their portfolio companies and formed McLaren Strategic Ventures to offer what they realized fledgling companies need: personalized domain consulting, advisory services, technology platforms, and targeted ecosystem distribution channels. Combining capital with services filled the gap for their portfolio companies and provided a head start to build revenue opportunities, empower innovation and accelerate time to market. The Season Two Ventures fund has since been rebranded underneath the McLaren Strategic Ventures Group to align the two businesses more closely.
Domain Expertise and Leveraging Capital Leads to High Growth
Business growth can be exciting and stressful simultaneously, but partnering with the right venture capital firm and leadership team reduces the chance of failure and drives strategic growth. Getting a business off the ground takes more than just leveraging money. It takes strategic experts who know the industry and have the domain knowledge to turn a fledgling business into an enterprise powerhouse.
