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India's Pioneering FinTech Company | Kunal Varma @ Freo (Part 1)
132 Plays4 years ago
Innovation and disruption are the hallmarks of the technology world. Amidst the fintech revolution and the subsequent rise of digital banks in India, going to a bank branch is no longer in vogue.
And with neobanking, this metamorphosis has reached a new level with state-of-the-art technologies and providing customers with easy, quick, and efficient financial services.
The Founder Thesis podcast presents to you a two-part series where Akshay Datt speaks with Kunal Varma, Co-Founder, Freo. He is a serial entrepreneur who started his entrepreneurial journey back in 2008, while pursuing his MBA from the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad.
Kunal, a self-proclaimed dreamer, fondly recalls his earlier days and shares how he always wanted to start his venture. After successfully building two ventures, he collaborated with Bala Parthasarthy and Anuj Kackar and started MoneyTap, which in five years has become an RBI registered NBFC and is now transitioning to credit led neobank, Freo, which is the first of its kind in the country.
Tune in to this episode to hear Kunal speak about how Freo is disrupting the traditional banking system with its innovative digital banking experience.
What you must not miss!
- If you like something in your academics, you're not going to do it for the rest of your life.
- How interacting with people from different walks of life can help in developing your vision as an entrepreneur.
- The transition from HR and EdTech to FinTech
- The concept of neobanking
- Relation between consumer research and building a product
- Fundraising journey
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Founder Thesis Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Take me on a tour. I'll take you on a tour. This could be a great intro. Hi, I'm Akshay. Hi, this is Aurob. And you are listening to the Founder Thesis Podcast. We meet some of the most celebrated sort of founders in the country. And we want to learn how to build a unicorn.
Kunal Varma's Entrepreneurial Journey
00:00:25
Speaker
Hi, this is Kunal Varma. I'm one of the founders at Frio Neobank.
00:00:32
Speaker
Serial entrepreneurs make for some of our most interesting guests. And if that entrepreneur is building something that would one day replace giant legacy corporations, then it's an even bigger treat. Kunal Varma, founder of Freo and MoneyTap, checks off both these boxes. He started his first entrepreneurial venture within his B-School, opting to be an entrepreneur instead of seeking placements.
Growth and Expansion of MoneyTap and Freo
00:00:56
Speaker
He subsequently built up an edtech business that got acquired before starting MoneyTap, a credit line app that is disrupting the personal loan and credit card industry. Today, MoneyTap is the leading credit line app in India and Kunal is expanding it to build a full-stack NIO bank with the branding of Freyo. Listen to Kunal telling Akshay Dutt about building products that consumers love and disrupting how people do banking in India.
Early Life and Education of Kunal Varma
00:01:24
Speaker
Okay, so Kunal, what's home for you? Where did you grow up and in what kind of family? I was born and brought up in a small town called Jamshedpur. My dad spent his career at the Tata's group and hence Jamshedpur being the hub for the Tata's group back then. All born and brought up over there. So my early years in life been
00:01:53
Speaker
fairly influenced and conditioned by the culture in that part of the country. And I think then somewhere in my teens moved out from there and moved to a larger town, a larger city. And that was my first exposure ever. So that was daily for me, obviously. It was a huge, I would say, difference from coming from a smaller town to a metropolitan city.
00:02:20
Speaker
Which school in Delhi did you join? Which class were you in? Yeah, so I joined the 11th standard in the Delhi Public School in Arqipuram. Wow, that's such a major change. BPS Arqipuram is like all fairly well-to-do families, kids come there and highly urban kind of a setup.
00:02:47
Speaker
That's true. That is true. I think it was, in some ways, it was also like, for me, a cultural melting pot to actually experience higher education, at least from a school standpoint, in Arkipuram. So the friends that I made at that stage of my life are still very close friends. And we all had something common. We all were in that school and we were looking at
00:03:14
Speaker
And I'm really working hard and making something good out of ourselves. And at least all of us were all looking at engineering. And that was the dream that we had, like as cliche as it may sound, but to become successful. You get an engineering degree from one of the top niche engineering schools in the country. It was the dream back then. I can see you.
00:03:38
Speaker
passed out in 97, which is also the year I passed out from DPS. We were in school at the same time. Wow. Wow. That is that is that is a small world. But having said that, I mean, the funny thing is that the DPS is such a big world, right? It's like almost 900 students in one class. It's almost impossible to know other people.
00:04:03
Speaker
Absolutely. Absolutely. I was in commerce. You must have been in science, I guess. There would have been very little portability of interaction. Yeah, that's true. I was in Section G as a computer science. So yeah, I think probably a bunch of geeks and kind of all living in our own world back then. So yeah. So yeah, that's how. And so Delhi was home for some time.
00:04:32
Speaker
And then I went to Roorkee for my undergrad. So I eventually passed out with a BTEC with honors in computer science. So in some ways, I think I did
Career Inspirations and Challenges
00:04:47
Speaker
my family proud by getting a certificate from IIT. But yeah, I think it was interesting. Four years of undergrad living in the Ganges belt of the country.
00:05:01
Speaker
some amazing life experiences, some long life bonds forged at that time. And then that paved the path for my adult life really after that. When you passed out of IIT, did you have an ambition in mind that this is what you want to do or what was it like? Yeah, so I've always had these
00:05:30
Speaker
I've always been like a dreamer since I was a kid and it was probably part of how I am as a person. I would love to just sit and dream about, you know, what I could become. And it started by, you know, thinking about when I was in probably like middle school, I would be thinking about becoming a football player because I've always loved sports. And then I dreamt of actually going and armed forces because I was always an outdoorsy kid, martial arts, sports, everything. Obviously, that was shot down by my diligent Indian mother.
00:06:00
Speaker
Who decided that? Who decided that? No, you know, I shall not go. And I mean, those are the days when I used to listen to my family. So obviously, as an obedient child, I had no other option but to comply. But but yeah, I think that was at every stage of my life, I had some dream. And I think it's important. I personally feel that it's important to have a dream and your dreams may change.
00:06:29
Speaker
But actually going through life, no matter how small you are, and without having a dream at any moment, it's pretty boring. It's like living life in monochrome. So for me, when I graduated, to answer your question, my dream was to eventually one day build a large company and leave a huge footprint of some legacy where I built a huge empire, where something has really changed
00:06:57
Speaker
or my company's changing people's lives in a big way. So I had this large blue sky definition in my head. It was very vague, but that is how it was. So where did you join from campus?
Experience at Texas Instruments
00:07:11
Speaker
Did you get placed through campus? Yeah, so it was very interesting because the year I graduated was 2001 in engineering.
00:07:21
Speaker
And just in 2000, the entire Y2K had happened, the whole episode, and then the dot-com bubble had burst globally, the dot-com crash. And that was an interesting time because I had got a job offer on campus on day one from Nortel Networks. And you're in your fourth semester of engineering. And then just before graduating and passing out of IIT,
00:07:49
Speaker
We got a letter from Nortel network saying we are shutting down our India operations. So, so yeah, so I think just like, you know, after celebrating your last final semester as an engineer, and I'm pretty much coasting through life for those six months, you suddenly there was a wake up call that, Hey, I don't have a job because the offer letter was rescinded. It happened across the board for a whole bunch of people. Obviously companies were shutting down their operations left, right and center. So.
00:08:17
Speaker
I was one of the folks at the receiving end as well. So it was a wake-up call. I suddenly realized that nothing is going to be served on a platter, so I need to immediately pull up my socks and get into hard work. So then eventually I ended up joining a startup right out of campus itself. I got placed in another New Jersey-based startup, but they had their R&D operations in Delhi itself.
00:08:45
Speaker
And it was a pretty nerdy job, back then coding, device drivers, all that kind of stuff. And I did that. I was pretty excited, a computer science geek myself. So I was pretty excited. I joined that company. And that was just six months because within six months I figured out that I'm getting rather bored at that job. And it was not really exciting me. I was not really solving problems which would really push my thinking.
00:09:15
Speaker
So I switched gears and I had a chance, for some reason this has serendipitous and I ended up joining Texas Instruments. In India? In India, out of their R&D unit in Bangalore. And that's where I spent the next seven years working with Texas Instruments. A lot of exposure, you know, traveling to their units in US, France, Japan, working with people globally.
00:09:45
Speaker
and some amazing life experiences as well along the way. But yeah, I think seven years at Texas Instruments and that is the only corporate job that I've ever had in my life. So that's the only one time where I've actually prepared for an interview myself or given an interview. So yeah, so pretty good fond memories, but that was it in terms of where I started.
Pursuing an MBA for Broader Exposure
00:10:10
Speaker
What made you stay with them so long?
00:10:13
Speaker
Like, you know, I'm trying to understand what was it about, whether it was the role or the culture. I think it was a combination of a few things. One is that I think back then, I personally was not exposed to concepts of work-life balance. What is work? What is work stress? What is personal life? I think these concepts were pretty foreign to me at that time.
00:10:40
Speaker
The culture was one of very, you know, high commitment ethic, hard working, high sense of ownership. My initial boss at one of my initial bosses at Tech Instruments was a phenomenal gentleman. And I learned so much. I mean, there was a time when I used to think that, you know, he's quite the taskmaster.
00:11:06
Speaker
But I loved working in that environment. So it's a combination of those things. And honestly, it was a huge discovery process for me. I mean, surprisingly, in my engineering, I was a computer science major. And I did not pay much attention to my hardware and electronics courses in IIT. Well, that is to put it quietly, the un-sugar-coated version is that I sucked at those courses.
00:11:35
Speaker
And the professors, they made it a point to call it out loud in the class. So all my friends and I were very clear that there's one thing that I should not be doing in life is going into electronics and hardware. And that is exactly what I ended up doing, which is going into Texas Instruments, which is all about hardware design. But I realized that as much as I was uninterested in the theory of it, I loved the actual work.
00:12:06
Speaker
And I did pretty well. I think the amount of learning, the contribution that we made, and particularly the people, I think that's what made me stick around. So the challenge of doing things which had not been done before, building out products, which were the first of its kind back then, you know, our department team used to file patents a lot. So that experience, along with the managers and the senior that I work with, I think that's what made me stick around.
00:12:35
Speaker
And like I said, you know, I mean, I really was not one of those people who were in, who had the spirit of giving up easily. So there were tough days, days when I used to, I used to have a small, I used to have a small pillow and a toothbrush at my cubicle. And there were days where we used to just like not, not go home. I used to go home, go home after 48 hours. So, but you know, but it was phenomenal. I did something.
00:13:03
Speaker
Something like that doesn't happen unless you are passionate about something. Because then there are so many options available. So you can just get up and quit one day and say, hey, this is not for me. But I think the culture and the people is what really allowed me to stick around. And I don't know, time just flew. And I just look back and they say, hey, it's been like almost seven years. But it was phenomenal, the experience of working across global teams and projects.
00:13:32
Speaker
So then why move out? What was the trigger to do an MBA? Yeah, it was one of those things where, like I said, a part of me has always been a lot about dreaming about what should I be doing in the future? What would my path look like? Why am I doing this?
00:13:57
Speaker
keep questioning, keep having these existential thoughts about myself and my life every once in a while. I'm not sure it's a great thing to do, but that is who I am. So I always knew that, look, I had this vision of starting something of my own and doing something. And I mean, I do not come from a family where everybody is an entrepreneurship, right? So my father's side of the family, there were no entrepreneurs, no family businesses. And my mother's side of the family, almost everybody is in business.
00:14:28
Speaker
But the one thing which is common across both sides of the family is that there are a lot of lawyers in the family. So I honestly thought that I would eventually grow up to become a lawyer, if not anything else. And I just go into the family profession. But I think what happened is that along the way, I realized that, look, I'm doing well in technology. But there are a couple of things which were coming out to me as a pattern. One was that I was somehow missing the big picture somewhere.
00:14:56
Speaker
in terms of what is the impact that I'm making through my daily slogging of 18 hours a day, seven days a week. So I'm sitting there, I'm working at like some 3 a.m. on a Sunday morning in office, coding my way away on hardware design. And I'm thinking about like, hey, I'm doing this work and I know that it's gonna make an impact, maybe second order, third order down the line, but I'm not sure if it's gonna move the needle for actual one human being's life.
00:15:23
Speaker
So I was, I had started thinking about a lot about, like, you know, I need to kind of find my path. I need to figure out how can I start something of my own and realize my dream. And the sooner I do that, the better it is because, you know, let's just make mistakes while you are young, you know, and so that you still have time to correct those mistakes and you have the energy to kind of find your new path. So I think a lot of this,
00:15:50
Speaker
introspection and looking at what I was doing and the impact that it was making really pushed me to the extent that I realized that, look, I just cannot, I cannot continue to do this. And obviously money and finances were not the motivator at all because I think financial is doing pretty well at TI. So if I had continued on a corporate growth path, I would be very comfortable in that sense in life.
00:16:20
Speaker
more than what I would have imagined. But I knew that now is the time. So that whole push of not seeing the impact that my work was creating on a daily basis and knowing that, look, I had this vision and it looks like after seven to eight years of working, I still have that vision. So that probably that itch has not been scratched or that dream has not been fulfilled. So I said, let's just
00:16:44
Speaker
let's just jump and make the jump and do it. So, but I needed a conduit, right? Like, you know, being in R&D, being a very geeky person and having a very narrow worldview and technology does not prepare you for life entirely. And unfortunately, we all grew up, I mean, I grew up in a culture where I was not prepared for the challenges of life. You know, how do you think about money? How do you think about financial planning? How do you think about future? How do you think about risk-taking?
00:17:15
Speaker
So the conduit for me was to take a year off, a year or maybe two years off, and maybe find a middle ground. And that seemed like business school, because that would allow me to get some exposure from people who are completely from different walks of life. And that's what made me take the jump against just amazing amount of opposition that I got from a lot of people.
00:17:45
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, then that is the start to all the opposition I started facing for the next couple of years in life. If you're interested in what you heard, you can visit freeosave.com and sign up to experience India's first credit building savings account. Sir, what made you want to
00:18:10
Speaker
create an impact? Was it inspired by the Tata philosophy, like, you know, considering your dad worked there? So, I mean, at some level, you know, how you look at things around you on a daily basis do impact you. And I was obviously in awe of growing up a lot in awe of GRD Tata, like a legendary person. And, you know, some of the other really, I would say iconic figures at the Tata's group.
00:18:38
Speaker
But I think it was that plus a combination of reading a lot about what other people had done for themselves. You know, those are the times when we were looking at other. Who were the people who inspired you? So I think the one thing obviously was, you know, growing up in an environment and looking at data. The second thing was I was obviously I started to hear a lot about how some of the big large scale entrepreneurs globally were making a difference. Right. So these are the days when
00:19:07
Speaker
I just started hearing about what Hewlett Packard was doing globally in terms of building the business out. I just started hearing about what Nike was doing, Phil Knight was doing. I just started hearing a lot about what the Birla group in India was doing. And of course, one wouldn't miss with the whole news about how Dhirubhai Ambani was shaping the future of the Ambani group or what he had done.
00:19:35
Speaker
So I think some of these figures made a lot of, you know, you kind of made you take a step back and think that, you know, if, if, if, if that's the scale of what people can do with the 24 hours of their time, and if I have a vision, then why not? Like, you know, I think I at least have the determination, but let me figure it out. So I think those are the days and that along with, you know, my own personal thing that looked, I have to create an impact. I have to create something big.
00:20:03
Speaker
But I wouldn't say there was any one major person which was completely life transforming as far as an impact is concerned, which forced me to jump in that direction. But it was more about getting more exposure or seeing more things around me and probably just being a person who is more, I would say, internally driven in terms of who I want to be and what I want to do. And I think a combination of these is what just made me take that plunge.
00:20:29
Speaker
So did you get more clarity in that one year at ISB in terms of what you have? Oh, absolutely. I mean, I absolutely got clarity because I started my journey as an entrepreneur while I was a student in business school. I think that for me was I think another seminal year in my life and particularly because of a couple of reasons. One is that
00:20:58
Speaker
Again, I was in ISB doing my MBA from the School of Business in Hyderabad in the year 2008. And that is the year the financial crisis happened, the entire Lehman Brothers, the entire market collapse happened. And we were all in business school and I had started then interacting with a lot of people who came from different walks of life.
00:21:25
Speaker
Chartered accountants, engineers, doctors, people from other commercial domains. And today, I think some of my closest friends are the people that I spend time with in business school. But that definitely opened up my eyes. It just gave me so many different dimensions and mental models to look at things. And on how to really frame a problem, how do I evaluate what choices lie ahead of me?
00:21:55
Speaker
I think all of this was heavily influenced by mostly my friends, I
First Venture During MBA
00:22:00
Speaker
would say. So the biggest influence for me at business school was my friends. The peer group. The peer group. And I'm so thankful. I'm so thankful for the peer group that I had access to. And that actually gave me some of my closest friends who I can today, who are like family to me. So I think that was my biggest.
00:22:25
Speaker
I think about online learning, you lose out on the peer group. Yeah, absolutely. And I think obviously the joke is that, you know, my friends and family tell me that, you know, I should never ever go back to any more education because the two years during which I graduated that there was an, the markets crashed both the years, 2001 and 2008. So I've been forbidden to go back for any higher, further higher education, not that I'm yearning too, but yeah.
00:22:54
Speaker
But yeah, that happened. And honestly, the time at B-School helped me forge some ideas around how should I look at my life in the next few years? Should I take the plunge of becoming an entrepreneur and whatnot? So I think that year and the influence of peer group and friends is what really changed my life in a big way.
00:23:18
Speaker
What what was the business you started like while on campus? And, you know, tell me about that, like, like that launch journey from idea coming to your mind to actually taking it off. Sure. I mean, now that I look back and if I married it to you, it's so funny in my head because it was all driven by passion and the unconditional support of my friends.
00:23:44
Speaker
Not so much driven by how I operate today, you know, having gone through the journey. But yeah, I think back then, so I started my first venture, which was mostly focused on providing marketing and branding services to other institutions. Marketing was my major in the MBA. I did not bear any attention to courses and streams like finance.
00:24:14
Speaker
And there's another inside joke and I'll probably tell you later. But yeah, I think a lot of my time spent in marketing and I started my... You can tell me now that this is not a... Yeah, I think when I look back, you know, I compare with what I did in my education and in my life and it's actually 180 degrees opposite. So in my undergraduate, I absolutely detested electronics and hardware and I love computer science.
00:24:43
Speaker
And I spent my job of my career at TI completely doing electronics and hardware, which was the exact opposite of what I liked. And in my MBA, I absolutely slept through most of my finance classes. And today, I'm running Freo, which is in the world of finance and FinTech. And I'm loving it. And I realized that I'm just thinking, why did I not do this earlier? I love this business.
00:25:09
Speaker
So I think that's the joke. I mean, everybody's like, you know, we, we exactly know that if you, if you, you know, if you like something in your studies and academics, you're definitely not going to do that for the rest of your life. I think somehow it's just, it's worked out like that for me. But yeah, so that was my first venture in terms of providing marketing and branding services to corporates. So for example, ISB used to have its annual alumni meet. So I decided to, you know,
00:25:36
Speaker
become the entire branding partner for all their branding and merchandise. That was like your first client? Like ISB was your first client? Yes, they were. But I had to actually bid for the project because it was not easy. Just because I was a student, they were not willing to just give it away. So I had to kind of outbid some other people and kind of get my foot through the door.
00:26:00
Speaker
But obviously they were very encouraging, ISB as a school. And that was my first client. And then from there on, I think I grew my client base to other institutions and corporates and companies. There'll be companies like Cisco, Johnson & Johnson. And what was the service offering? Was it like digital marketing? No, so the service offering was that these institutions, they were looking at creating
00:26:29
Speaker
a whole full-fledged branding program for future joinees or employees and creating a complete branding team in terms of how should they make sure that their brand and their culture translates into products or merchandise, that their employees, that their partner, that their clients would consume. For example, things like a branding message around some event, things like products, like merchandising, like it could be branded
00:26:59
Speaker
souvenirs, it could be t-shirts, it could be any major marketing collateral, or just the strategy around how should they translate their culture and thinking into a branding strategy for their employees, for their partners on the ground, and then eventually make sure that it gets translated into some actual product which is either worn by people or used by people on a day-to-day basis.
00:27:24
Speaker
So in short, if there was a scope for some new design of souvenirs and t-shirts and other products to be created, I would be advising them on how to go about it. And then I expanded my offering from not just providing the services, but I said, I will also actually get the product free. And then I tied up with manufacturer. I said, well, why not just increase my value chain?
00:27:49
Speaker
penetration over there. So I did that and I tied up with manufacturers at the back end. These are wholesale manufacturers on different types of merchandise. And I would source the product, I would create the whole strategy, source the product and provide the end finished product. And I would really make my margins on the value that I was providing. So that was my initial journey. So obviously in the first two to three months itself, I started generating cash flows.
00:28:16
Speaker
because of the services business and I had very, very minimal capital requirement from my side. So I started making money very quickly. So I realized that the amount of money that I was making when I was working at Texas Instruments, I had already started making that kind of money in about five to six months of becoming an entrepreneur for myself. So immediately I thought that look, this is okay from a money standpoint, but as far as the
00:28:45
Speaker
But as far as the problem that I'm solving on a day-to-day basis, I'm not sure if I'm going to love solving the same problem, you know, two years down the line, three years down the line.
Skills Development and Platform Model
00:28:56
Speaker
So after having done this for about a couple of years and having made whatever money I could make, I then moved on to doing something else which was
00:29:09
Speaker
Again, like a kind of a lateral transition and all of these companies when I used to my clients, they used to keep asking me that, you know, while you've done this branding and merchandising and marketing strategy for things, but we also need to engage our employees. And then there are training programs, a whole bunch of activities. So do you know somebody who can help us engage our employees and offer training programs for a whole bunch of things?
00:29:32
Speaker
And that is what allowed me to transition and realize that that was probably a much larger problem, which was all around training and skill development and skill assessments. And that's what allowed me to take all the cash that I had made over there and morph myself into a skills assessment and skill development company. And that was my second major switch.
00:29:57
Speaker
This was something like metal, like an online thing? Yeah, it was like metal in some ways. And incidentally, you mentioned metal. Keaton, the founder of metal, was my classmate at IIT. Oh, wow. OK. Yeah, yeah. Different streams. Keaton wasn't metallurgical. I was in computer science. But obviously, friends from background, IIT days. But they were doing something which was more technologically savvy at that point in time.
00:30:27
Speaker
initial focus started on with a more human driven, human driven initially. And then I think that evolved and pivoted into a, I would say a larger platform and a product play eventually. But yeah, my first step there was a slightly more services oriented model. And I think it was also driven by my desire to always keep making money. So I kind of had made a promise to myself that
00:30:54
Speaker
As much as possible, I will always try to be an entrepreneur who does not lose money. And I think till date, I can say that at least I have not lost money. But my starting point in services back then was driven by that focus that I should be making money. And then eventually, it kind of evolved into a much larger technology-driven platform play. I got a co-founder on board.
00:31:22
Speaker
as I changed my whole idea and thought process, we worked together to create something big. And then that's what led me to the next leg of my journey. So over here, what were the kind of engagements you were getting? Like say a company wants to train the front-level staff or
00:31:44
Speaker
Yeah, so this is like mostly it was about training and skill development for most of the professional staff, which is like mid-manager and managerial level staff. So this would be about different areas of professional development. Initially, it started out by a huge demand for areas of training and assessment around organizational behavior, organizational development. I would say negotiation, conflict management.
00:32:13
Speaker
Those are the areas that I used to get a lot of queries for. And that then kept growing, and I kept adding areas to it. And I expanded the repertoire of services that are being offered. I kind of built a network of other professional individuals who could actually deliver the same outcome under my brand and create a revenue-revenue-sharing model. Because I had to figure out how to scale this, because I have only so many hours in the day.
00:32:42
Speaker
learned how to deliver it by myself, that wouldn't be the smartest thing to do as an entrepreneur. So then I built a network of people who could actually create high quality content and deliver. And I also started doing a lot of it myself because I really enjoyed it. And that then evolved into my next product play, which we call Skillwiz.
Future of Freo and Podcast Invitation
00:33:07
Speaker
We have now come to the end of part 1 of our conversation with Kunal Varma, co-founder of Freo. In part 2 of this conversation, we find out how Freo plans to make a strong mark of its own within the Neobanking category and what the future looks like for them.
00:33:25
Speaker
If you like the Founder Thesis Podcast, then do check out our other shows on subjects like Marketing, Technology, Career Advice, Books and Drama. Visit thepodium.in that is T-H-E-P-O-D-I-U-N dot I-N for a complete list of all our shows.
00:33:45
Speaker
This episode of Founder Thesis Podcast is brought to you by Long Haul Ventures. Long Haul Ventures is the long-haul partner for founders and startups that are building for the long haul. More about them is at www.longhaulventures.com