Bangalore-based venture fund Omnivore Partners wants to raise a corpus of $90 million. It has announced it is close to achieving half this amount and the deal may be closed in November 2017. It may take them another two months to source the balance funds, reports Economic Times.
The objective of Omnivore Partners is to invest their funds in 20 startups in the food, agritech and rural innovation-based sectors. The increasing use of technology in the agriculture sector has drawn the interest of the venture capitalists and other investors. Technologies like big data, precision agriculture and internet of things IoT are some of them and they all use analytics to figure out the ideal solutions.
Areas like choosing the ideal crop to grow to match the soil conditions, bringing in improvements in the soil itself are also factored in by these startups in their operations.
As mentioned, food and nutrition are the main focus groups and within these, sub-groups or sectors will also be considered by Omnivore for funding and at this juncture, they will look at seed-funding opportunities and also series A stage startups. Again, ventures which can bring some king of innovative ideas to the table in the chosen fields.
Omnivore has fixed a target of acquiring 30-35% stake in the startups they pick up to fund and the objective is to stay with them to do follow-on funding also till the series B level. Based on these objectives Omnivore hopes to be able to fund 18 to 20 projects through 2018, with the $90 million that it is raising now.
There are also reports that for follow-on funding in the agritech sector, venture funds from the UK and from countries like France and Denmark are also interested.