B2B network for startup funding Finvolve on Thursday announced the closure of their first Rs 100 crore fund for early-growth stage startups from “prestigious families (family offices) and marquee investors”, the company said in a statement.
Finvolve also announced two new funds: a pre-seed Accelerator fund and Scale fund to back startups at the pre-seed stage and those showing significant traction and typically profitable respectively.
Finvolve is a joint venture between seed-stage startup accelerator India Accelerator and Finolutions, a B2B consulting form for wealth managers. The company enables a curated deal flow of investible startups for wealth managers.
Speaking on the development, Apoorva Vora, Co-Founder, Finvolve said the multi-stage funds (accelerator, seed and scale) will “provide comprehensive support to startups from ideation to IPO, ensuring they have the resources and expertise needed to succeed in a competitive global market.”
For the investors, Vora said, multi-stage funds provide “diversification across different asset classes, which helps to spread risk and potentially enhance returns for our LPs.”
Finvolve said $150,000 per startup will be invested through the Accelerator fund to help startups expedite their market entry. From the Seed fund, $500k-$1 million will be deployed and from the Scale fund, $1 to $3 million will be invested.
“We have developed aggressive & bold forward-looking theses in fragmented industries with long-term tailwinds, in businesses with a compounding technology advantage, for example, unmanned vehicles & space, energy & mobility, circular, impact, ONDC, etc.,” said Ashish Bhatia, Co-Founder, Finvolve.
The company aims to capitalise on the financial market’s investment gap by sourcing and investing in opportunities other funds are missing due to their size, networks, pipelines, and biases, added Bhatia.
Importantly, Indian startup funding in the first quarter of 2024 had slowdown as the funding winter continued. As per Tracxn’s Geo Quarterly India Tech Report – Q1 2024 (till March 15), $1.6 billion was invested in the first quarter across 222 rounds, down by 27 per cent from $2.2 billion in 291 rounds in Q4 2023. In Q3 last year, $1.9 billion was invested in 269 rounds and $1.6 billion was invested across 360 rounds in Q2, FE Aspire had reported.
The Q1 drop was 51 per cent from $3.2 billion invested in startups in Q1 2023 while funding rounds also declined by 48 per cent from 432 in Q1 last year.