Unicorn India Ventures has announced its 2nd equity fund of Rs 400 crore to be invested in diverse sectors. The company says it will follow a pattern in picking up startups for early stage investments where the ticket sizes will be smaller and then scale up the funds to be deployed once the startups reach a certain growth stage.
This is the second fund that the venture capital firm has floated after the first one was announced in 2015. Of the Rs 400 crore, the company hopes to close around Rs 150 crore during the course of this calendar year alone. B2B, SaaS, Fintech, Healthtech, Robotics, Gaming and Digital Content are some specific verticals Unicorn has identified for funding with this 2nd fund that it has created.
Anil Joshi, Managing Partner, Unicorn India Ventures says that the ventures will be picked for early stage investments and the typical ticket size could be in the range of Rs 3 crore to Rs 5 crore. These would be the Pre-Series A and even Series A funding for these startups depending on the size of the company, requirement of funds etc. Artificial Intelligence, IoT, 3D cyber security and fintech are some of the sectors Unicorn has always pursued with interest with the first fund as well.
“Having a cross border fund helped us in getting insights from the matured economies eg the rise of neo banking in the fintech space in the UK, a global market leader in fintech. That is how when Open Bank came to us, we were aware of the emerging business model and were ready to invest. This gives us a boost and a belief that we have a knack to spot a potential winner in the early days. These factors compounded with the fact that we think like entrepreneurs and stay aligned to their macro vision have resulted in success of our first fund,” Bhaskar Majumdar, Managing Partner, Unicorn India Ventures said in a statement.
Unicorn Ventures has revealed that where they see the potential and based on the track record of eligible startups, they could participate in the Series A and B funding too with ticket sizes in the range of Rs 10 crore to Rs 30 crores.
From a global perspective, this new fund will actually be the third version since Unicorn has made some investments in the UK last year in association with AscensionVentures, a UK-based venture capital firm through what was an exclusive UK-focused fund. Six companies in the UK have been recipients from that fund so far.
Unicorn refers to some winners from its pick through the Fund I investments; these include Open Bank, SmartCoin, Sequretek, Pharmarack and NeuroEquilibrium. Genrobotics, a robotic machine to eliminate manual scavenging and Openapp, an AI based smart locking solutions are other path-breaking startups that received support from Unicorn.
Apart from these, the companies Unicorn had invested in include VLCC VanityCube, Inc42, GrabonRent, Inntot, SectorQube, Perfit, , Boxx.ai, Clootrack and Openapp.