SaaS startups: Early stage startup fund Unicorn India Ventures on Tuesday announced the first close of its Rs 1,000 crore Fund III. The first close was at Rs 225 crore while the final close is expected by March 2024. With the new fund, Unicorn India Ventures is looking to back 25 startups operating in global software as a service (SaaS) and digital platforms where the fund already has expertise. Among sectors, climate tech, agritech, spacetech and the semiconductor space would be in focus.
Launched in 2016 by Bhaskar Majumdar and Anil Joshi, Unicorn India Ventures had launched its Rs 300 crore second fund in 2020 wherein several of the portfolio companies raised multiple rounds in the first two years after the initial investment, the fund said. The second fund has 20 startups in its portfolio.
Also read: VC fund gradCapital launches $6M fund; to invest $40k in student startups; check details
Bhaskar Majumdar, Managing Partner, Unicorn India Ventures, said, “Being the first institutional investors, before doing any investment we spend considerable time with the founders to understand their vision, team’s capabilities, growth plans and leadership style. Our focus is to invest in companies that are enablers of India’s digitisation across sectors. We avoid high cash burn businesses like D2C, Consumer Internet, content businesses.”
Currently, Unicorn India Ventures has over 35 companies in its overall portfolio. “Most of the startups within the current portfolios are already profitable or have a clear path to break-even,” the fund said.
With the third fund, Unicorn India Ventures would invest around $ 1 -2 million dollars initially before exploring follow-up investments in the companies. As a part of the investment thesis, the fund invests only 20 per cent of its investible corpus to create the portfolio and the rest is deployed to invest in the best-performing startups in the portfolio.
Unicorn India Ventures also announced senior hiring for the third fund with Bikram Mahajan as a Partner having 20 years of experience in private equity and investment banking with the last decade in fund management. On the other hand, Kamlesh Ahuja has joined as VP (Fund Operations) responsible for all compliance and back-office administration for all the funds.
“We have always believed in the Bharat story as much as the India story. While we have invested in startups from Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore but over 60 per cent of our portfolio is built from startups coming from emerging regional hubs like Kochi, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Pune and Hyderabad amongst others. Unicorn is perhaps the only fund which has worked tirelessly with state govt in Kerala, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh to roll out startup policy with an aim to find high potential startups from tier 2 and 3 cities,” said Anil Joshi, Managing Partner, Unicorn India Ventures.
Among the fund’s portfolio companies are Open, Genrobotics, Daalchini, Fedo, Sequretek, and others.