Mohan Kumar, former partner with Norwest Venture Partner India and Nishant Rao, ex-COO at Freshworks, have jointly founded a $300 million fund-‘ Avataar Venture Partners.’ The venture capital fund has been set up to boost the capital growth of B2B and Software as a Service (SaaS) startups.
Avataar Venture Partners fund will focus on making $10–30 million growth-stage investment in B2B and SaaS companies that have at least $15 million in annual recurring revenues and are looking to scale globally. The fund has been backed by HarbourVest, a US-headquartered private equity firm with more than $64 billion in assets under management.
The founding partners of Avataar said, “With Avataar, we want to create an ecosystem of strong execution-focused partners who have built scale, have seen the story before and can bring timely learning from past successes and failures to our entrepreneurs. The fund will focus on bringing this as a key differentiator beyond capital. The partnership with HarbourVest will allow us to provide capital needed to scale our businesses.”
Avataar Venture Partners was started in July 2019 and as per the founders, the Avataar Venture Parterns firm was incorporated on the belief that to successfully build, scale, and accelerate the growth of companies, entrepreneurs will need partners with operational action bias.
While, according to Kumar, the Avataar Venture Partners will work closely with leadership teams of the investee companies to help them scale their business.
Tim Flower, Managing Director, HarbourVest Partners, said, “As an investor in Avataar Venture Partners I, we are delighted to be partnering with Avataar to provide the necessary resources for companies to reach their maximum potential. We look forward to working with the team as it executes its strategy of scaling these companies into global businesses.”
The founders added that the B2B startups and SaaS companies have strongly emerged as the key focus area for investors.