FAQ
- Which are the current companies in the Morpheus portfolio?
Morpheus adds talented, progressive and young startups to their portfolio once every 6 months. View our portfolio here
- What value do you add to a portfolio company?
Morpheus’s main value comes from the following:
# Working with you as a Co-Founder (limited) who is experienced and well connected
# Mentoring and hands on participation across different functions like product design, technology, operations, marketing, sales, fund raising, team building, finance etc
# Learning gained from the experience of working with our portfolio of startups and watching them grow, falter and grow
# Access to Morpheus’s existing (and growing) business relationships and contacts in India, Silicon valley and other parts of the world
# Access to our community of ever growing Morpheus portfolio entrepreneurs
# And our passion, love and commitment to early stage startups 
- How much equity do you take in each of the companies?
We take an equity stake of 7% to 12% in each of the companies which engage with us as part of the business acceleration program.
- How long is your engagement with the companies for?
Phase 1: The Business Acceleration Program consists of 4 months. This amounts to the intensive engagement with each portfolio company. During these 4 months, we spend up-to 10-15 hrs per week per company.
Phase 2: Our involvement with each of our portfolio companies is life long. Even after the active 4 month engagement, Morpheus works with its portfolio on a as needed basis. So far we have not denied any request for help from any portfolio company from the previous batches.
- Do you invest money in companies?
We are investing INR 5 Lakhs in each of the startup selected in our batch (starting Batch 4 in March 2010)
- What will be Morpheus’s specific role with the portfolio companies?
Morpheus enters the relationship as a limited co-founder. We work with the founding team to achieve the business goals and accelerate the overall progress. We align ourselves with the goals of the business and work along side the core team to achieve the desired targets in each of the departments.
We add value in all departments of the business; we also work as representatives of the startup in the external world, as required, to help in fund raising, business development, customer acquisition, etc.
- What’s the background of people involved with Morpheus?
The partners at Morpheus come from varied backgrounds, with a common passion and calling – working with startups. All of us are serial entrepreneurs, with a mixed experience of failing as well as succeeding. We have all started ventures from the scratch, bootstrapped, managed sales, raised money and finally in some cases sold the companies and made a decent exit.
Morpheus also has an extensive panel of Mentors, who help companies with specific issues and provide help in specialized domains, such Mentors are people who have done exceptionally well their domain and are an authority in their area of expertise.
- Do we have to be incorporated before applying to Morpheus?
No, it’s not mandatory to have been incorporated before applying to Morpheus. At Morpheus we help you incorporate your company too!
- What is Morpheus exit strategy?
Like every other business we need to make money too! We plan to do that by selling the shares that we get in our portfolio companies. Shares can be sold at one of the three events : IPO, Merger / Acquisition, Sale of our shares to a new or existing shareholder of the company. We are happy to wait for the long haul, 5-7 years and see you through. But by taking a small equity without any special rights what we are saying is “We make some money, when you make a lot of money”.
- How do I apply for Morpheus’s program?
Morpheus accepts companies to their Business Acceleration Program twice a year. You can apply for the program by filling out the rather simple yet efficient form that’s available here. We will go through the details submitted by you and then take things forward.
- I want to ask more questions before applying?
Please address your questions via mail to neo AT morpheusventure DOT com. We’re also happy to have a talk with you, you can request for a call too by writing a mail to us
- I would like to talk to founders from some of your portfolio companies
We can arrange for that after our initial discussions with you. Please drop us a mail to neo AT morpheusventure DOT com
- Do we work with companies who are direct competition to our existing portfolio?
The answer is not a simple No or Yes. We would be happy to discuss your idea to figure out where the competition aspects lie before we make a decision. We do practice a professional policy of Non-Disclosure of critical details between companies we interact with.
- Do we mentor only .com type of start-ups?
No. If you look at our current portfolio of companies, perhaps less than 15% of our portfolio is a .com type of company.
- Do we work with single founder start-ups?
Yes. Ideally, you should have one more person whom you have “sold” your idea/prototype, but we have a few success stories with single founder companies.