We’ve been constantly interacting with new, young & not so young but passionate entrepreneurs the past 2 months and we’ve loved every moment of the same.

25th March 2010 was the last day for applying to our Business Acceleration Program (BAP). Around 20 applications came in during the final few hrs

And So, Applications for Batch 4 of the BAP are now officially closed!

Thanks to all the teams that have shown interest in our program and have taken the time to apply. We value your time and intent. Currently we are in the process of going through each of your applications and will be setting up calls with teams that are shortlisted. You will hear back from us by 31st March. (Okay, in case you do not hear from us for whatever reason by 31st, do ping us!)

Off to reading more applications! There’s a flood, a flood of applications @ the morpheus

Update (Apr 1, 10:01p): We are still heads down into the applications. Give us few more days!

Clarification (Apr 6, 08:59p): There is no announcement of results on the basis of applications as it is a continuous process. We have been sending 1:1 emails to companies who have moved to the next step of “dating” (con-calls/face-to-face) and we have already engaged with some of them. We have also communicated to companies where we can’t add any significant value. If you are feeling impatient and haven’t heard from us even now, then drop us an email!

Why the rechristening you ask? Besides in-keeping with trend of renaming, versioning – we think – Morpheus reflects the new role we have taken on. So, welcome Version 2.0 – The Morpheus!

The Morpheus:

In its new avatar, Morpheus will invest 5 Lakh INR (10,000 USD) in portfolio companies starting Batch 4 of its Business Acceleration Program (BAP). We have raised a small fund to help start-ups monetarily giving them the impetus over and above our real mentoring value.

Our LPs are a group of young, bright professionals who have placed trust in Morpheus, understand the start-up landscape & above all, believe in YOU – the Indian Start-up Founder! Special thanks to all our LPs for laying trust in us and believing in Morpheus.

Open for applications:

We are accepting applications for Batch 4 of the Business Acceleration Program (BAP) that starts last week of March. Last date for receiving applications is March 10, 2010.

Find more information about the BAP here: Apply , FAQ

Morpheus – continues to stand by you:

In the last two years, we have had an absolutely great time working with the 40+ founders of our 20 portfolio companies. They are working hard innovating and continuously creating value. Thanks to them, that our belief in the Indian start-up opportunity is growing stronger by the day!

Morpheus continues to believe that India has some of the most gifted, smart, hardworking young entrepreneurs amongst us. And India itself is a land of overflowing opportunity with a large domestic market; infrastructure & support system that takes to build global products. So we continue to lay our trust in the Young Indian Entrepreneur.

No, Not VC’s but entrepreneurs like other fellow-folks!

Though we are investing a small amount of money to facilitate start-ups; Morpheus’ core competency will continue to be the value we bring through our Business Acceleration Program (BAP), as a business accelerator and advisory firm. The 4 month intensive engagement to help the start-up team accelerate their business; the community value that is gained by extensive interactions amongst Morpheus Portfolio Founders (The Gang) are our primary value.

As an entrepreneur / start-up, if you are looking ONLY for funding – we are not the right people to talk to. If you are ready to accelerate, go from 40 miles per hr to 100 miles per hr– We’d like to talk to you. Drop us a line: neoATmorpheusventureDOTcom

Find out more about us: Team, What we do

Morpheus’ main mission is to work with young ambitious teams & together create enterprise value, jobs, social impact, and thus script the new Indian economy. And create wealth for all associated along the way!

Sharda Balaji of Novojuris adds:

MVP has been on the forefront of helping startups succeed. Their hands-on approach, working alongside the entrepreneurs as a co-founder, no-nonsense attitude and their approachability is awesome!  For young entrepreneurs who feel lonely figuring things out, they must enroll with MVP for the sheer acceleration of their business.

Jaya Jha, Co-founder of Pothi further added when we told her about our latest effort:

The initial days of a young entrepreneur are best spent in being able to take the idea off the ground, rather than handling VC meetings, negotiating contracts and detailing exit plans. Most businesses don’t need a lot of money at that stage. But all of them need some! And it needs to come with the right mentorship.

Finally, closing with a quote that’s relevant to us all:

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

Theodore Roosevelt
“Citizenship in a Republic,”
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

Wikipedia definition of *Phoenix

After successful introduction in US, an MVP portfolio company, Crederity is launching its consumer services in India.

• You can create a FREE account here.
• Add your credentials (address, education, experience and more) and have Crederity verify them for you.
• You will get a “Crederity Card” which you can proudly display on your site, blog,  online or offline resume, social networks, online matrimonial profile or anywhere else you want.
• It instantly highlights the “trustworthiness” of your profile and markets your profile to help you stand out and improve your prospects.

The team has worked hard to create a seamless service experience for both businesses and individuals. Any feedback from you will help to improve further. Go ahead, give it a spin and share your views.

Participants include our portfolio founders from Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, a couple of other startup friends of MVP and a few well known folks like:

• Subrata Mitra from Accel . A very active and succesful early and growth stage VC firm working with startups in India, USA, China and London
  
• Sharda balaji from Novojuris - a legal firm with special focus on working with Startups
• Indus Kaitan, Chief Plumbr of Sezwho. Indus has spent 10+ years in building startups in silicon valley . SezWho is a universal profile service for the social web – a popular startup in Silicom valley.
• Harish Gandhi Alok Mittal from Cannan. (Update: Harish came in place of Alok and we had a great session with him)
• Ananya Majoomdar from Times Private Treaties
  

Agenda:

• Internal Sessions with MVP companies
  • Duration: 30-40 minutes each
  • Format : Interactive sessions
  • Goal:
    • Give the presenting company founders LIVE access to brains, thoughts and ideas of 10-15 peers.
    • They can gather a lot of fodder for thoughts and get inputs on some key business problems
  • Part 1 : Presenting company talks about their Business (5-8 minutes)
    • Whats the product
    • Whats the market
    • Whats the team
    • Present status
    • Plans going forward
    • Key Challenges / important business problems they are working on
  • Part 2: Other company founders will provide (25-30 minutes)
    
    • feedback
    • ideas
    • views
    • potential solution to the mentioned business problems
    • ask questions
    • point out risks etc

• External Sessions with Investors / Entrepreneurs etc
  • Format: Informal interaction, Q & A, discussions, know each other etc
  • Number: 2-3 Sessions
  • Duration : 60 minutes each

A few days ago we had blogged about how we went about interacting with the startups to shortlist a bunch of bright entrepreneurs who have great skill sets, vision and a lot of passion.

MVP has started its 4-6 months mentoring program with the second batch of seven startups starting September 1, 2008. The 7 startups that are a part of MVP – Batch 2 – 2008 are:

Call Graph
www.callgraph.in

Call Graph is a service to record, track, monitor, share and transcribe your calls. It is designed for distributed teams who use services such as Skype for their meetings, conference calls etc and for individuals who use such VoIP services for interviews, taking lessons etc. Currently Call Graph provides a recording client for Skype for free along with 1 GB of storage space and 1 sample transcript.

Crederity
www.crederity.com / www.crederity.co.in

Crederity helps prevent identity and credential fraud through an online  verification and certification program, enabling individuals and businesses of integrity to stand apart while safe guarding them against fraud. Crederity’s services allow anyone to easily, safely and securely share, request and verify personal and business information. Today, Crederity serves thousands of individuals through its partnerships with web destinations such as SimplyMarry, and dozens of SMBs and large multinationals. This work is helping Crederity to build innovative infrastructure, processes, and databases to ultimately offer real-time background history verification in India. With our PAN-India network, we cover the remotest places in India with the help of 3,700 business partners spread across the length and breadth of India. With exclusive tie-ups with different data sources and our proprietary technology, we are quickly moving towards becoming the leader in identity / credential verification and fraud/inconsistency detection.

Deskaway
www.deskaway.com

DeskAway “simplifies teamwork”. DeskAway is a subscription-based online team and project collaboration service that enables small businesses & teams to organize, manage & track their work online. With the growing number of small businesses/ distributed teams, increased broadband penetration, and 24×7 mobile work culture, DeskAway is rightly poised to give teams an accurate view of how their projects are doing and help eliminate common problems that occur when multiple people are collaborating: email spam, multiple file versions, lost files, task accountability issues, lack of clarity & work transparency.

Dhanax
www.dhanax.com

dhanax stands for exchange of dhana or wealth, works with the vision to connect people from different economic backgrounds and thus create wealth for them. dhanaX (www.dhanax.com ) is an online/offline people-to-people lending platform that lets Indians to lend and borrow money from fellow Indians. dhanaX leverages the power of technology to bring together people from diverse backgrounds but have a common goal to create wealth and help each other. Started by a high caliber team to develop a “people driven financial organization”, dhanaX is rapidly growing to capture USD 91billion Indian micro-credit market.

Fachak
www.fachak.com

Fachak.com is a startup which would redefine the way people share & discover content on internet. Whether it’s a file on your pc or a link on internet, fachak.com aims to be the definitive sharing platform. We are a democratic setup and completely driven by our community which votes to decide the featured content.  We are currently in a private beta stage. If you are interested in knowing more, you can go to www.fachak.com and put your email id to know more.

Life Mojo
www.lifemojo.com

LifeMojo’s focus is on creating a platform for delivery of preventive health care services and partner with renowned health experts for their consultation. For health care service providers, LifeMojo has a hosted CRM (Software as a Service or SaaS). The company already has Dr. Shikha Sharma, renowned weight management and health expert, as a customer for this offering and is in talks with several other individual health care experts and organizations. For people looking to live a fitter / healthier life, LifeMojo is a one-stop shop for expert consultation and fitness products. LifeMojo (www.lifemojo.com) would be available for public use in early October. LifeMojo is accessible on the Web and mobile using GPRS/SMS with the first-of-its kind LifeMojo mobile tracker.

SutraHR
www.sutrahr.com / www.sutrajobs.com

Sutra HR is a full services People Consulting firm which has a unique partnering model with Digital, Mobile and Internet startups and entrepreneurial companies in India, to find retain assess and train talent to take them to the next level and beyond. Based on the Success of its offline services, Sutra HR is launching SutraJobs.com an endeavour designed specifically for startups and Emerging companies in the new age media space who are venture funded or are  too cash-strapped to afford the services of a consultant to find the right talent.

The MVP (morpheus venture partners) team has completed the selection of the MVP-Batch2-2008. This batch has 6-7 companies of the crème de la crème of the startup scenario in India, and the program kicks off  today (1 September, 2008). The details about these companies will be announced soon. The companies from the last batch (MVP-Batch1-2008) are Instablogs, Commonfloor and FoodAtHome.

We are very excited about the new batch of startups and would like to high light a few points here:

• Each startup has a rockstar team, with the right set of skills, a great vision and a lot of passion.
• Each startup is targeting a large market opportunity which is growing at a rapid pace.
• Most importantly, there is a lot of comfort level between the MVP team and the founders.

MVP team will work closely work with these startups for the next 4-6 months on areas like product development/launch, customer traction, B2b deals, team building, revenue models, etc. (every startup has unique needs!).

The main goal for the startup founders & MVP  is to build something impressive enough to raise the next round of capital. Once the team feels that point is reached, we will introduce the startups to early stage investors—and in some cases even acquirers.

Journey so far

MVP was in stealth mode for about 6 months (first half of 2008) and was formally launched two months back on 3 July, 2008 on sameer’s blog and nandini’s blog. The response so far has been quite encouraging both from startups and media which covers startup related news (morpheus news).

We received around 100 applications from all over India, from which we created an Initial shortlist of 15. All these 15 are excellent teams and promising ventures on which we would like to have worked on.   But, considering various factors we had to choose some and let go of a few.

The next step was to bring the 15 down to 6-7 who will be a part of MVP-Batch2-2008. This decision involved various factors like: stage of the venture,  working relationship between MVP team and the founding team, quantum of value that the MVP team could add to the venture and make an significant impact, etc.

Coming up…

• Announcement of names and other details about the MVP-Batch2-2008
• Accouncement of the schedule for MVP-Batch1-2009, which will start sometime in March-09.
• Ongoing updates on MVP as well as MVP portfolio companies.