Mumbai: Venture Catalysts, India’s largest early-stage investment firm, has announced that it has made a partial exit from its portfolio Cusmat Technologies (Cusmat), an immersive skilling platform that large enterprises use to upskill their industrial workforce, with over 4.2 x returns in less than three years, resulting in more than 60% XIRR.
Venture Catalysts had first invested in Cusmat’s seed round in 2020 and took an exit in the $3.5 million Series A round that the startup raised in February 2023 from Arkam Ventures, Unitus, Better Capital, We Founder Circle, 9Unicorns, and MapMyIndia amongst others.
Since 2020, Cusmat’s Immersive Skilling Platform has been leveraged by several large enterprises to upskill their industrial workforce in order to improves Productivity and safety standards while reducing Costs – their clientele includes companies such as Procter & Gamble, ABB, Vedanta, Tata Steel Mining, DHL, DTDC, Dr. Reddy’s, Voltas, Schneider Electric, Toshiba Mitsubishi, Volvo, Sandvik, Ultratech, and many more. Besides India, Cusmat is already expanding operations in other countries in the APAC and MEA regions.
On the exit, Dr Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, Founder and Managing Director at Venture Catalysts, said, “We have been invested in Cusmat since its Seed round way back when the term Metaverse was not even coined or was popular. We believed in the concept and continued to back them through their Series A round. The company has posted some impressive growth metrics in the last two years, and with that, they have offered their initial investors an option to exit with 4x returns. We take pride in supporting such founders. The move has also brought a lot of optimism in the ecosystem, especially during a challenging economic environment for raising primary rounds.”
According to a report by the World Economic Forum and PWC, poor skills cost the global economy $6.5 trillion, out of which $570 billion is attributed to India alone. Cusmat’s experience with large industrial brands in India and in a couple of leading South Asian markets has shown that the ‘skilled via the Metaverse’ workforce is ~30% more productive, 25% more efficient, and 70% safer than their peers. Furthermore, the retention rate for those ‘skilled on the metaverse’ is very high, hovering at 70% on an average.
Abhinav Ayan, Co-Founder & CEO, Cusmat said, “The metaverse is the ideal environment to develop muscle memory and heightened retention needed for the optimum performance in real-world industrial activities. The great feedback from large enterprises across multiple sectors in India and South Asia has convinced us of the product market fit for our skilling metaverse platform. Our goal has consistently remained to positively impact the top line and bottom line of enterprises by improving the skill level of their operators & technicians.”