Introducing Sweta Rau, Angel Investor and Founder of White Ventures

Location

Sweta Rau attended Mithibai College in Mumbai, India in the early 1990s. Immediately after, she studied at Mumbai University, whereafter she proceeded to enter the workforce. Working as a technical consultant, Rau gained experience around the technology industry, before returning to school in 2012 to attend the SP Jain Management Institute. 

She furthered her education again in 2019 by attending an advanced program for the study of FinTech and BlockChain at the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta. Currently, Sweta Rau is based out of Singapore, where she leads White Ventures.

Remarkable Investments

Sweta Rau founded White Ventures in 2017, and has since focused her investment activity on firms that use technology to improve efficiency and promote growth. 

One of her earliest investments was Bank Open, Asia’s largest SME Neobank. After a successful Series D funding round early in 2022 year, the company became India’s 100th unicorn. The startup is used by more than 2.3 million businesses and is currently processing over $30 billion in transactions each year. 

Rau also helped to fund a digital ledger app for SMEs called Khatabook, which received the award for “Best Innovative Mobile App” at the India Digital Awards in early 2020. The app currently boasts more than 20 million registered users. 

Other investments include companies like YapM2P, a leading API platform for banking and payment companies throughout Asia which helps to facilitate simpler money transfers worldwide. Series C funding allowed YapM2P to achieve over US$100 million in investments.

Rau is also involved in the EdTech space, and was an early investor in Uable, a progressive social media service exclusively for teenagers. After launching, the app quickly surpassed half a million downloads with goals for 10 million daily users by the end of 2023. 

This is far from Rau’s only EdTech investment, as she is also involved with a student mentorship program called LeverageEDU that seeks to provide international work and study opportunities for Indian students. This AI-enabled marketplace caters for approximately 2,500 monthly users and is valued at around $120 million after Series B funding. On top of all of this, Rau helped to create India’s largest mobile gaming and eSports platform, Mobile Premier League (MPL), another unicorn, which offers more than 60 different online games to more than 90 million users in India alone.

Sweta Rau In The News

The Hindu Business Line published an article in March of 2021 naming Sweta Rau as one of 2020’s most active women in India’s startup ecosystem. Indian Transport and Logistic News reported on one of these investments, Rau’s Angel investment into a Hyderabad based logistics firm named Exprs, stating that Rau helped to raise 4.5 crore of seed funding, equivalent to more than $500,000.