India Quotient, the Mumbai-HQed early-stage venture capital fund behind companies like fashion discovery app Roposo and Ratan Tata-backed online meeting place for chefs and food lovers — HolaChef, has now announced its plans of raising a fresh $20 Million fund, to continue with its early-stage/angel funding into newer startups.
India Quotient was set up by ex-Seedfund investor Anand Lunia along with social venture capital firm Aavishkaar executive Madhukar Sinha. The early stage venture capital firm has already backed 28 Indian startups, with a combined valuation to the north of $200 Million.
Talking about their firm’s fresh fund-raise, Lunia said in a statement,
We decided to cut down on the size of the fund because of appreciation in the existing investments.
He says that while his firm was actually looking to raise over ₹200 crores, they cut down on the size, largely because of appreciation in current investments.
India Quotient’s second fund has been specifically very successful. According to Lunia, the second fund is up three times on average with five of the seven startups backed already raising series-A round. This includes chef and foodie meeting platform HolaChef, which recently announced a ₹20 crore Series A round, with investors like Ratan Tata participating in the round.
Both Lunia and Sinha have contributed up to 10% of the corpus of the new fund, whose other investors include entrepreneurs, angel investors and institutions from both India and overseas.
India Quotient, which primarily funds non-revenue, or rather pre-revenue startups through its fund, has already seen a massive 3.7 times appreciation for all of its funds raised so far.
However, even though India Quotient’s current fund size is almost four times the $4.9 Million it raised in 2013, the fund size is less than a tenth of what VCs such as Saif Partners, Kalaari capital or others have raised.
And Lunia acknowledges this being one of the reasons why India Quotient misses out on a few good deals.
We miss out on some very good deals because we are not able to cut a million dollar cheque from the start and back companies alone for 2-3 years, which some of the larger VCs are able to do,
said Lunia
