India’s largest platform for seed and early-age investing, Indian Angel Network (IAN), has launched a new Rs 1000 crore fund to further back its portfolio companies and make new investments.
The second fund, titled ‘IAN Alpha Fund’, comes nearly three years after the network achieved the final close of its maiden fund, IAN Fund, at Rs 375 crore in November 2019.
The SEBI Registered Cat II VC fund is built to leverage the portfolios of both IAN Angel Platform and IAN Fund I besides investing in new sustainable businesses, the company said.
The fund will add significant impetus to IAN’s vision of backing raising Rs 5000 crore to back 500 start-ups and creating 500,000 jobs. Its portfolio of over 200 companies, including three unicorns, has a market valuation of $9 billion collectively. The company has so far infused Rs 900 crore into early-stage start-ups and has created over 80,000 jobs, it claims.
“IAN is recognized in the industry for pioneering angel investing in India and it has continued to innovate by launching a VC fund (IAN Fund 1) along with the Angel Group to provide a seamless platform for seed and early-stage investing. The launch of the IAN Alpha Fund is the logical evolution of our desire to provide quality entrepreneurs with money, mentoring and market access,” Saurabh Srivastava, Co-founder of IAN said.
The Alpha Fund will back start-ups that leverage technology to solve real problems with large addressable markets. The Fund is looking to invest in cleantech and environment, healthtech, agritech, edtech, fintech, and emerging sectors like Industry 4.0, space tech, Web 3, robotics. It will invest with cheque sizes ranging from $1 to $5 million along with co-investors.
Padmaja Ruparel, Senior Managing Partner of IAN Alpha Fund, said the network’s first fund is fully deployed now and has started to return capital.
“This (the new fund) will, in fact, leverage and garner benefits from IAN’s global network, domain experts & high-quality mentors to help the partners build another high-return potential portfolio. We will be keen on investing in innovative ideas that have the capacity to generate profits and aim to solve real-world problems,” she added.
Alpha Fund’s investment committee includes Saurabh Srivastava, who was also the Co-Founder and past Chairman of NASSCOM; Ajai Chowdhry, Founder, HCL; Pravin Rao, who recently retired from Infosys as COO; Raman Roy, Chairman and Managing Director of Quatrro, and Atul Batra, Ex-CTO, Manthan Systems. The Fund’s advisory board includes Kris Gopalakrishnan, Co-Founder, Infosys, Sunil Munjal, Chairman & MD, Hero Mindmine & Hero Corporate Services and CP Gurnani, MD & CEO of Tech Mahindra.