Fri. Mar 29th, 2024

Bengaluru-based tech-focused early stage venture fund pi Ventures has announced the final close of its first fund at ₹225 crores. The fund exceeded the initial target of ₹195 crores by 17%.

The fund plans to invest in 18-20 startups in healthtech, logistics, retail, fintech, and enterprise sectors, in the coming three-four years, with a significant portion allocated for the follow-on rounds.

The fund is co-sponsored by In Color Capital of Canada. Last month, it raised ₹40 crores from the UK government’s CDC Group. pi Ventures announced its second close in January, raising funds from Sunil Kant Munjal, Chairman of Hero Enterprise, Electronic Development Fund, and corporate financing arm of Hero Electronix.

It is to be noted, that the fund received 60% of its corpus from institutional investors and a majority from Indian limited partners

Other investors that contributed to the fund include International Finance Corporation (IFC), SIDBI, Accel Partners, along with entrepreneurs like Mohandas Pai, Binny Bansal, Founder and CEO of Flipkart Group, and Deep Kalra, Founder and CEO of MakeMyTrip Group.

AI and IoT focused pi Ventures was founded by Manish Singhal and Umakant Soni in 2016. The fund invests between $500,000 and $1 million in new age technology ventures solving the real world problems.

“India AI ecosystem is at an interesting intersection of data, talent and market need. We are seeing an increasing number of good companies in the B2B space and look forward to backing startups which are creating global solutions from India,” Manish Singhal, founding partner at pi Ventures.”

So far pi Ventures has made six investments, these include, SigTuple, a healthtech startup leveraging machine learning techniques, Locus.sh, a Bengaluru-based intelligent logistics automation startup, CustomerSuccessBox, an actionable customer success platform for B2B SaaS businesses, NIRAMAI, healthtech startup focused on novel breast cancer screening solution, Zenatix, a data-driven energy efficiency startup, and ten3T, a medical grade wearable device startup.

By Varun

Startups | Books | Ideas

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