Open Sourcing Early Stage Investment Documentation and Compliance

1. Series Seed India powered by Humble Paper
Standardizing Early Stage
Investment Docs
India
Module 6, 1st Floor
IITM Research Park
Chennai, TN - 600001
United States
340 S
Lemon Ave #9923
Walnut, CA - 91789
Humble Paper

2. Series Seed India powered by Humble Paper
with startups

3. Series Seed India powered by Humble Paper
Timing is everything

4. Series Seed India powered by Humble Paper
Today India is estimated to be a home to
more than 10,000 technology based start-ups
with up to 8,000 new start-ups
sprouting every year

5. Series Seed India powered by Humble Paper
250+ India v 6,500+US
early stage businesses funded every year

6. Series Seed India powered by Humble Paper
Even as start-up costs for Internet
companies have fallen
precipitously over the last few
years catalysing the start-up
movement in India, legal costs for
the same have only gone up

7. Series Seed India powered by Humble Paper
Even after investors commit,
deals take inordinately long
and often fall through

8. Series Seed India powered by Humble Paper
Documents currently used
for early stage investments
actually resemble later stage
deals
Lack of transparency in
early stage investments and
typical deal terms leads to
over-negotiation and
unnecessary friction

9. Series Seed India powered by Humble Paper
The need of the hour is
to reduce negotiation
at early financing
rounds to key
commercial points
with deals being
closed quickly using
standardized
documents

10. Series Seed India powered by Humble Paper
Humble Paper is open-sourcing
a set of legal
documents for seed
financing in India and
publishing it on the
Internet.
For free.

11. Series Seed India powered by Humble Paper
Initial Release (v 0.0.1)
★ term sheet
★ share subscription and shareholder agreement

12. Series Seed India powered by Humble Paper
Guiding Principles
• Not Proprietary. Open source, licensed under the creative commons license.
• Language and Structure. Should appear familiar to lawyers but be simple and readable
by non-lawyers. Strike a balance between the language in current legal documents and
plain english.
• Help. Clauses should be annotated with helpful commentary justifying their legal and/or
commercial utility.
• Upgrade Path. Each document package should have a clear upgrade path to the next
financing stage.
• Concise. A term sheet should ideally be one or two pages. A shareholder agreement
should ideally be 7-10 pages.

13. Series Seed India powered by Humble Paper
But we won’t stop at just providing
the documents for download

14. Series Seed India powered by Humble Paper
We’ve built a platform to interactively generate
ready-to-sign documents using an intuitive
questionnaire

15. Series Seed India powered by Humble Paper

16. Series Seed India powered by Humble Paper
and we’re going further
to provide a one-stop platform, we’ve already tied up with a top-tier Indian law firm and
with a panel of chartered accountants and company secretaries
★ we’ll track and assist you with your RoC and RBI filings
★ we’ll help simplify and streamline cross-border deals
★ we’ll manage the cap table as each startup passes through successive financing
rounds
★ we’ll provide investors with a dashboard to each of their portfolio companies

17. Series Seed India powered by Humble Paper
We’re just getting started.
Request an invite, partner with us or
generally reach out to us at
support@humblepaper.com