pi Ventures, a venture capital firm which focuses on Artificial Intelligence (AI) , Machine Learning and IoT investments, has today announced the first close of their maiden fund at $13 million. The VC firm aims to raise $30 million and close the fund within this year.
Limited partners who invested in the current round include India’s top lender to small businesses, SIDBI, prominent family offices from USA, Canada, Singapore & India, and leading entrepreneurs like Mohandas Pai, Binny Bansal, Deep Kalra, Sanjeev Bikchandani and Bhupen Shah among others.
Manish Singhal, Founding Partner, pi Ventures, said,
India is the dark horse in the AI race given it has lot of data, brilliant data science talent & early adoption environment due to broken processes and we are happy to play a part in helping India leapfrog with AI. We are thankful to our early backers, investors and founders who have chosen to work with us. We are very excited to play a role in building a strong AI based product ecosystem in India.
The VC firm was co-founded by Manish Singhal and Umakant Soni in 2016. It invests in early stage start-ups that focus on solving problems in healthcare, logistics, retail, fin-tech and enterprise sectors using AI, ML and IoT. The Bengaluru-based firm plans to invest in 18-20 start-ups from this fund over a 3-4 year time frame.
So far, it has made three investments in the healthcare & energy-efficiency space — namely SigTuple, Zenatix and ten3T. SigTuple is in the medical diagnostic space and is creating a deep learning driven, cloud based solution for detection of abnormalities and trends in medical data, for blood diagnosis.
Zenatix is a data-driven energy efficiency company that uses advanced machine learning based models and delivers 10 to 30% energy efficiency to large commercial consumers of electricity along with predictive insights to prevent downtown. ten3T is in continuous monitoring of medical data like ECG in real time through its own smart patches to enable mobile ICU for smaller hospitals.
