Pre-seed venture capital firm Eximius Ventures on Thursday announced its second fund with a target corpus of $30 million and plans to invest in 25-30 companies across fintech, artificial intelligence (AI)/software-as-a-service (SaaS), frontier tech, and consumer tech under the new fund. The initial cheque size would be $500K while reserving half of the corpus for follow-on investments.
The fund has already backed four startups in consumer tech and AI/Saas with Eximius either leading or co-leading investments alongside other institutional investors.
The new fund follows Eximius’ inaugural $10 million fund launched in 2021. It will attract capital from a mix of limited partners (LPs) including high net-worth individuals (HNIs), founder-investors, family offices, as well as global Japanese corporate venture companies (CVCs).
Speaking on the launch, Pearl Agarwal, Founder and Managing Partner at Eximius Ventures, said, “At a time when funding is becoming increasingly selective, Eximius is doubling down on pre-seed startups, with an aim to drive momentum in India’s innovation ecosystem. We reject the ‘spray and pray’ mentality, especially at the earliest stages, and instead focus on backing bold, thesis-driven ideas with contrarian view points.”
Eximius Ventures’ first fund has backed 23 startups, around 60 per cent of which have secured multiple up-rounds from global investors, delivering an IRR (internal rate of return) of over 40 per cent.
The new fund aims to double down on the success of Fund I using a similar strategy.
Eximius’ made nine investments in 2024 compared to four in 2023, nine in 2022 and five in 2021, as per data from Tracxn. It has made 22 seed-stage investments and two at Series A stage. Some of its portfolio companies from the first fund are Jar, Vegapay, Stan, and others.