Indian Angel Network (IAN), in an attempt to take its investment strategy to the next level, has planned to launch its first fund with a corpus of ₹350 crore. The fund is aimed at bridging the gap between early-stage funding between angel and Series A rounds.
It has already started working on its plans and has closed the first leg of funding with around ₹175 crore. ETTech also reports that the SEBI-registered Category 1 Alternate Investment Fund has a green shoe option of an additional ₹100 crore.
Investors who participated in the current fund include Sidbi, IIFL, YES Bank, some marquee family offices and numerous industry heavyweights such as Infosys’ Kris Gopalakrishnan, Hero Corporate Services’ Sunil Munjal, Inventus Capital Partners’ Kanwal Rekhi, and Google India’s Rajan Anandan, among others.
Some of these members are also part of the fund’s advisory committee to guide the 450-investor platform across investments in over 17 sectors. Commenting on this, Padmaja Ruparel, President of IAN, said,
The proposition of the fund is to leverage the sectoral expertise of individual investors and (use their expertise to) mentor companies in those sectors.
The IAN Fund will act as a bridge to the entire network investing around 20% in every deal that the IAN platform invests into, at the angel stage. The fund will follow up on the investment in the subsequent round of IAN portfolio companies along with corporates or other VCs. It will also invest in non-IAN portfolio companies that have seen investments by other angel networks.
With this fund, IAN is looking at ticket sizes ranging from ₹50 lakh to ₹30 crore and to co-invest with other VCs. The fund will still remain sector-agnostic and will look at areas of healthcare, SaaS, marketplaces, fintech, big data, artificial intelligence, and hardware.
The timing for the launch of this fund is interesting. The first quarter of 2017 has seen angel and seed investments fall both in volume and value terms with deal volumes reduced to half. January-March 2017 has seen 120 deals in comparison to 245 deals in the same period last year with Series-A funding slumping 65% in deal value on a YoY basis.
IAN and the IAN Fund, together, along with its co-investors is targeting investments worth ₹1,500 crore across 160 companies over the next 5 years.
