Indian Economy News

IAN marks final close of Rs 375 crore maiden venture capital fund

  • IBEF
  • November 7, 2019

As per the Senior Executive of Indian Angel Network (IAN), a network of individual early-stage investors, IAN has reached the final close of its maiden venture capital fund at Rs 375 crore (US$ 53.66 million). The fund will invest in startups and provide strategic mentorship along with market access to entrepreneurs. 

The IAN fund is backed by the institutional investors like Small Industries Development Bank of India's fund of funds, IIFL Holdings, Yes Bank, Max India, impact investment firm Gray Matters Capital and Hyundai. Kris Gopalakrishnan, Sunil Munjal, Rajan Nandan, Kanwal Rekhi, Vikram Gandhi and Jerry Rao also have contributed to the fund in individual capacity.

"For a startup, funding delayed is funding denied. We realised that one of the big gaps in angel funding was that a lot of startups faced problems in scaling up their businesses and raising further capital, after the first round of funding. As IAN Fund, we want to provide a platform for startups to get mentoring and early-stage funding so that they can build a team and scale up, as we make sure they don't fall over the brink," said Ms. Padmaja Ruparel, founding partner of the IAN Fund.

The fund will be able to invest between Rs 25 Lakh (US$ 35.77 thousand) and Rs 50 crore (US$ 7.15 million) in each opportunity, along with the other co-investors. The fund will focus on investing in start-ups within healthcare, agritech, fintech, cybersecurity, edutech, hardware products, consumer focused and in deep technology firms. Ruparel stated, "We will continue to remain sector-agnostic and will invest in companies across geographies, which are well-differentiated and catering to a unique need for mass markets".

In 2017, having achieved its first close at Rs 175 crore (US$ 25.04 million), IAN fund has, so far, deployed about Rs 150 crore (US$ 21.46 million) across 40 start-ups. IAN portfolio comprise of companies like SmartVizs, which is a virtual reality platform for building industry, education financing firm Propelled, pregnancy health assistant PregBuddy, fruits and vegetables delivery start-up freshworld and beer company Coolberg.

In May 2019, the fund made its first all-cash exit from TagBox, an industrial IoT focused firm, by making the three-fold returns within 18 months of investments also recording an internal rate of return of 162 per cent.

Disclaimer: This information has been collected through secondary research and IBEF is not responsible for any errors in the same.

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