Early-stage investor Unicorn India Ventures, which is also a SEBI registered AIF-I VC fund, has today announced that it has closed Rs. 40 crore of its Rs. 100 crore fund. The fund will be used to invest in early stage startups.
The VC firm was founded by Anil Joshi and Bhaskar Majumdar, which plans to invest in the areas like social media, mobile, analytics, cloud tech and IOT. It will raise another round of funding by the end of April 2016.
Anil Joshi, Managing Partner, Unicorn India Ventures, said,
Unicorn India Ventures has been started with an aim to discover start-ups that are doing groundbreaking work in their field. We want to be a partner in their journey towards growth and use our resources financial and otherwise to help them scale up. We want to bring best-of-breed international experiences to the start-ups.
Apart from the announcement of its first close, the firm has also announced the appointment of Aayush Jain, as a Principal for the fund and will head Unicorn’s Delhi operations.
He has more than 8 years of experience in corporate and product strategy, capital raising, business/corporate development and M&As across sectors including technology, media, cloud, digital, consumer and education.
The fund is planning to invest in 10-12 start-ups in a year, which will help it to create a portfolio of 30 companies in 3 years. Before investing in a startup, the partners spend close to 2 — 3 months with founders of start-ups to understand their business model, team at work and co-founders’ working relationship among other aspects like potential of scale up, global reach of the company etc.
Bhaskar Majumdar, Managing Partner, Unicorn India Ventures, said,
We are quite clear about the kind of start-ups and teams we want to engage with. We prefer to invest in a company which has more than one founder. However, we don’t involve ourselves in the day to day operations of a company as we believe founders should be in the driving seat making all big decisions. We are their sounding board and a guide.
Unicorn India has been structured as a hybrid fund whose first investment in start-ups will be a seed round in the range of Rs 50 lakh to a crore. It will also invest in and participate in the Series A round of startups as a co-investor.
Anil Joshi further stated that they are betting on sectors like fintech, app based business helping enterprise solution, cloud technology which are solving real life problems of either end users or other businesses.
As for Unicorn’s investment parameters, apart from monetary investment, Unicorn is also committed to mentor and help entrepreneurs build successful ventures. The fund will be interested in investing solely in a venture or co-invest with another fund or institution. The deal size is likely to vary from anywhere from ₹50 lacs to ₹500 Lacs.
