Unicorn India Ventures Announces First Close of Fund III At INR 225 Crore With this Fund, UIV aims to build a portfolio of 25 startups that are focused on global SaaS and digital platforms
By Teena Jose
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Unicorn India Ventures (UIV), an early-stage fund house, has announced the first close of its INR 1000 crore Fund III. The first close is reached at INR 225 crore and final close is expected by March 2024. With this Fund, UIV aims to build a portfolio of 25 startups that are focused on global SaaS and digital platforms. The firm also stated that the Fund is looking at newer sectors of climate tech, agritech, spacetech and the semiconductor ecosystem.
"We continue to identify innovative business models with faster scalability. The metrics for us is a clear path to profitability for the companies. 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," said Bhaskar Majumdar, managing partner, Unicorn India Ventures.
Post the success of the First Fund, Unicorn India Ventures launched Fund II, an INR 300 crore fund launched in 2020 that is said to be invested in 20 companies. According to the company, the Fund III would look at investing a first cheque of around $ 1 -2 million dollars and would then look to invest in the follow on round. As a part of their investment thesis, UIV invests only 20% of its investible corpus to create the portfolio and the rest to back the winners of the portfolio, according to a press statement.
Unicorn India Ventures has also announced senior hiring for Fund III. The team is joined by Bikram Mahajan as a Partner, who will play a key role in the next phase of the Fund's growth, with a primary emphasis on portfolio management and nurturing the growth of investee companies.
"With this third fund, our commitment to nurture Indian startups will be unwavering and we will keep scouting for highly innovative companies whose disruptive solutions can address real life problems of users by leveraging technology," said Anil Joshi, managing partner, Unicorn India Ventures.
