Early-stage venture capital pi Ventures has announced the first closing of its second fund, which will invest in 20-25 startups over the next three years, for a total of 300 crore ($40 million).
The fund II will be launched in March 2021, with a base corpus of 565 crore ($75 million) and a green shoe target of 750 crore ($100 million). Manish Singhal, founding partner at pi Ventures, told Business Insider that the investment firm hopes to announce the second close by mid-2022.
Several high net worth individuals (HNIs) and family offices have invested in the venture fund, including Mamaearth’s Varun Alagh, Flipkart’s Binny Bansal, MakeMyTrip’s Deep Kalra, and senior executives from IBM, Facebook, and Google.
Pi Ventures, which was founded in 2016, closed its Fund I in 2018 with 225 crore ($30 million). The fund has invested in 15 startups, including Niramai, a breast cancer screening solution, Wysa, a Google-backed mental health platform, Agnikul, a spacetech company, and Locus, a logistics company.
Pi Ventures Fund II, like Fund I, will be sector agnostic. This fund has already been used to support the biotech startup ImmunitoAI, which is working on an AI-powered antibody discovery and screening platform.
“The interest in our fund demonstrates the confidence of our investors in our team and our investment strategy. We will continue supporting early-stage entrepreneurs in the deep tech space and we take the learnings from our first fund portfolio to scale on this now proven strategy,” Singhal added.
Get to know the pulses of the Indian startup ecosystem in reality by attending “INDIA FIRST TECH STARTUP CONCLAVE & AWARDS’22-Delhi Chapter” organized by the All India Council for robotics and automation, supported by the Ministry of electronics and information technology.
The event is scheduled to be held on the 17th and 18th of February 2022, marking the biggest tech startup event this year. The event brings together the speakers that are the best breed of entrepreneurs, innovators, venture capitalists, government department’s representatives, business model creators, consultants, policy-makers, academicians, support groups, business coaches and business practitioners.
The Platform helps startups to ramp up their innovative ideas and show off their services and products to attract investors. The experts of the industry will address and discuss all the innovations happening around the startup environment that youth empowerment and new-age tech business ideas can grow.
Click to know more about India’s biggest tech startup event: https://www.aicra.org/events/delhi/index.php