Mumbai-based early stage fund house Unicorn India Ventures has announced first close of its second equity fund at $12 million. The second equity fund of Rs 400 crore was announced last year. Unicorn India has raised funds from domestic investors comprising family offices and investors from the first fund.

The Fund expects to reach final close in next 12 months, which is expected to see participation from large institutional investors.

From the new fund, Unicorn India will participate in Pre-Series A and upwards rounds. The cheque size is expected to be a million dollars. The Fund House expects to invest in 20 companies from the second fund.

With the first close, Unicorn India has also announced its first investment in a Trivandrum -based startup SaScan Meditech.

SaScan is an innovative Neo-Diagnostics startup developing integrated hardware and software solutions for medical diagnostics.

Founded in 2016, currently Sascan is focusing on bringing OralScan to the market, a handheld fully automated solution for non-intrusive Oral Cancer screening. The company is also working on clinical trials for a device to screen for another common type of cancer.

With the new funds, SaScan will explore the possibility of developing its proprietary technology for the diagnosis of other types of epithelial cell carcinomas and pre-cancerous abnormalities with a vision to build a comprehensive diagnostics solutions range for easy, accessible and early cancer detection.

Bhaskar Majumdar, Managing Partner, Unicorn India Ventures says, “Our first fund has been performing quite well. Many companies from the first fund like Open Bank, Genrobotic, Sequretek, Smartcoin are scaling up faster than its peers. They have already caught the attention of many top-notch international funds. With this second fund, we hope to continue our track record of identifying innovative business models with faster scalability across sectors B2B, SaaS, healthTech, robotics, gaming and digital content.”