Vani Kola led Kalaari Capital invests in Fitness & Wellness Startup Portl

By: WE Staff | Monday, 21 June 2021

Home fitness and wellness startup Portl, has received an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Kalaari Capital.

Portl is a fully-integrated, multi-functional, smart fitness and health system founded in March 2021 by second-time entrepreneurs Indraneel Gupta and Vishal Chandapeta. The company combines fitness, technology, and media.

It has created two products, the Portl Mirror and the Portl Pro, based on the company's proprietary Portl Smart Mirror platform, which offers a variety of personalised workouts, nutrition, and mental wellness programmes.

Kalaari Capitals has become India's leading early-stage business investor in four years, with 55 investments. The team looks after the entrepreneurs and advises them on all aspects of growth. The fund receives approximately 2000 proposals per year and is still growing!

Kalaari Capital focused on early-stage investments in technology-oriented companies across India. The name is derived from Kalaripayattu, a form of martial arts that originated in Kerala, India's southernmost state. The team's goal was to develop an entrepreneur from a bright mind.

Vani Kola is a venture capitalist from India. She is the founder and managing director of Kalaari Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm based in India. In 2014, Fortune India named her one of the most powerful women in Indian business.

Kola worked in Silicon Valley for 22 years. She was the founder and CEO of the e-procurement company RightWorks, which she sold to ICG after four years for $657 million. She was the founder and CEO of Certus Software at the time.

Drawn to the growing Indian Opportunity, she founded a venture capital firm in India after a successful career as an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. It was her first venture into venture capital in India, in collaboration with New Enterprise Associates (NEA). It was renamed Kalaari Capital in 2012.

Kalaari Capital began operations in September 2012 as a $150 million fund.  As of 2017, the firm's assets under management totaled US$650 million, thanks to Kola's leadership.

Forbes had named Kola one of the most powerful women in Indian business.  she received the TiE Delhi-NCR 5th Edition of Women Entrepreneurship Summit Award in Delhi and also received the Midas Touch award for best investor in 2015 as part of The Economic Times' first-ever startup awards.

She also received the NDTV Women of Worth award for business and entrepreneurship leadership excellence. In 2016, she was named as one of LinkedIn's Top Voices. She has been featured in several books and was named one of Fortune India's 'Most Powerful Women in Business' in 2018 and 2019.

In April 2020, ACT Grants, a not-for-profit initiative coalition of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, was formed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This initiative has been spearheaded by Kola and other senior leaders. ACT Grants has already supported 50 different ventures with a corpus of 100 crores.