Exclusive Interview with Utkarsh Sinha, Managing Director of Bexley Advisors

Bexley Advisors is a boutique investment bank based in Mumbai, India. The firm provides strategic mergers and acquisition advisory, fundraising support, portfolio exits, and follow-on services supporting tech and media companies and investors in their early funding rounds. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Utkarsh Sinha, the Managing Director of Bexley Advisors.

Kindly brief us about the Company, its Specialization and the Services it offers.

Bexley was started around the insight that there is a dearth of quality advisors for early-stage companies.  The base of the investment banking pyramid gets vacated every few years, as the banks increase the threshold transaction level at which they get involved.  Similarly, most of the top-tier consulting firms can't justify a low-value transaction. If one is willing to work on smaller transactions, we felt there is a strong opportunity set available. We believe we have been able to bring the discipline and rigor of late-stage, bulge bracket banking to early-stage transactions.

What's the Mission of your Company? Tell us about your journey from the inception.

Our mission- is to be the adviser of choice to high growth, high potential companies by bringing late-stage discipline into early-stage transactions. We started the company in 2019, just before the pandemic hit. We began by advising young entrepreneurs to rag their first institutional cheque – sometimes, as low as $200k. From that base, we have been able to grow into larger transactions – we are presently advising on several transactions in the $25m – $50m range.

Kindly Share your Point of View on the Current Scenario of Big Data Analytics/IoT/Big Data/AI/Robotics and its future.  

I have written an article on deep tech and the world-changing era: I feel there is a tremendous untapped opportunity available, particularly to India, given our strength in engineering. There is an urgent need for venture capital to convert some of the pioneering ideas that are emerging from this space into home-grown world-changing companies. The unleashing of 5G in India will be a revolution that will rival, and even surpass the 4G revolution. While the 2G / 3G revolution was about number 4G about increasing bandwidth, 5G has the potential to give broadband to the masses, and that will have a transformative effect on media, entertainment, IoT, and Big Data.

The data exhaust from mobile consumption is underlapped today, and we can expect that as the number of data increases, the layers of analytics and insights that can be built on top of it will grow exponentially. The shift away from China as the manufacturer for the world is creating a tectonic shift in global supply chains. With most global brand early-stage China+1 strategy, there is a tremendous potential for high-tech manufacturing to emerging transaction-basement on some of the major challenges the company has faced till now

I think one of the biggest challenges we confronted, was the unexpected slowing down of early-stage investments as a result of the pandemic. We adapted quickly to it, shifting from a purely transaction-based model to more of a consulting and advisory model. We have managed during the past year, and have grown to advise companies in additional sectors, investors raising their maiden funds, and even some large institutions.

What are the Most Important Trends you see, that are Emerging Across the Globe?

• Rise of autonomy and IoT
• The immediacy of communication through G
• Penetration into underserved communities (India: tier 3 and below)
• Rise of growth equity capital in India
• Rise of manufacturing outside China as global supply chains are redrawn and companies develop a China+1 strategy

What's your Growth Plan for the Next 1inflexion

We plan to continue down our current path in the immediate future: we are working to work with some of the most exciting companies in India, advising them both on early-stage fundraising issues. We are fortunate in being involved at the most critical points of inflection in the lives of a company, and can often see the vector of the impact these companies and individuals will have in reshaping our future. We will continue to focus on early-stage transactions, where the real innovation happens while growing with our clients who know and trust us and would like us to continue to help them as they scale.

How Does Your Company's Strategy Facilitate the Transformation of an Enterprise?

We take a fundamental consultancy to our engagements. We recognize, first off, that we do not know the answers. So, at the start of any engagement, the bulk of our time is spent in listening mode, where we learn from the founders and the teams. It is a privileged position to be in, as you are learning from the best. We then have all the resources and our intellectual capital to develop the best course for our client. We often give advice that is contrary to their immediate ask, or indeed our best interest. Sometimes, the harder thing is to say no, and there have been several examples where we have differentiated ourselves as bankers who say no to a transaction, talking our clients out of a transaction that was perhaps not in their best interest.

Our engagement is deep and wide: we go into the minutest details of the company's operations and can develop models that are defensible and realizable. We have found that the work we put in helps investors too – who often had to do this digging on their own time. In contrast, when they receive an opportunity that's been vetted by us and prepared by us, they can move to a decision a lot quicker and with much richer data than if they had had to do this directly.