Early stage venture fund pi Ventures on Tuesday announced raising $13 million (Rs 87 crore) in the first round of its targetted $30 million (Rs 200 crore) fund, expected to close this year.

Leading entrepreneurs like T.V. Mohandas Pai, Binny Bansal, Deep Kalra, Sanjeev Bikchandani and Bhupen Shah are among the partners to invest in the fund that focuses on start-ups in applied Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies.

"We plan to invest in 18-20 start-ups focusing on solving problems in healthcare, logistics, retail, fin-tech and enterprise sectors using AI, ML and IoT over the next three-four years," said the city-based venture fund in a statement here.

Other investors include state-run Small Industries Development Bank of India and unnamed prominent family offices from Canada, India, Singapore and the US.

"As India is the dark horse in the AI race with lot of data, brilliant science talent and early adoption environment due to broken processes, we will help the country leapfrog with AI," said Founding Partner Manish Singhal in the statement.

Umakant Soni is the co-founder of the venture capital (VC), which has not specified the investments made by the partners, individually or collectively.

The VC has till date invested unspecified amounts in three start-ups - Sigtuple, Zenatix and Ten3T, which are in the healthcare and energy efficiency space.

SigTuple is creating a cloud-based solution to detect abnormalities and trends in medical data for blood diagnosis, Zenatix is a data-driven energy efficiency firm, and Ten3T is in monitoring of medical data like ECG in real-time.