Prime Venture Partners, a Bengaluru based VC firm, has announced the first close of its fourth fund (with a goal of $100Mn), having raised a massive $75Mn already.
This fund, which is the largest in Prime Venture Partners’ history, has seen massive interest from institutional investors, which make up for more than 90% of the total investor base for the firm’s latest endeavor. These include World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, University Endowment, several family investment offices and institutions, and global technology entrepreneurs.
With this fund, Prime plans to make our to six investments a year, with a goal to exhaust the capital in the next 3 years. It wants to continue taking on the role of a first institutional investor, and focusing on areas like fintech, edtech, healthtech, global SaaS among other internet driven markets. The VC firm also plans to expand into Decentralised Finance (DeFi), crypto, electric vehicles and gaming infrastructure.
“The rapid pace of digitisation in the last couple of years has brought these sectors into focus and we believe that they will see tremendous growth going forward,” said Shripati Acharya, cofounder and managing partner at Prime Venture Partners.
This makes a lot of sense given the current market scenario, where Indian firms have been able to grow at a never seen before rate in the past few months. Since the start of the year, 25 companies have turned unicorn, i.e. achieve a valuation of $1Bn or more. All of these companies come from different sectors of the market, but there’s a clear trend-most of these new behemoths have their roots in the internet sphere, tackling existing problems with the use of new age technology.
Thus, Prime’s aim to invest in software companies, which are focused on international customers comes as no surprise.
The firm raised $72Mn in 2018, $46Mn in 2015 and $8Mn in 2012 as part of its third, second and first fund respectively. With this, it has backed 32 startups including security management platform MyGate, healthtech startup MFine, remote patient-monitoring startup Dozee and neobank Niyo.
