Early-stage venture capital firm IvyCap Ventures, which has backed companies like BlueStone, Purplle and others, has announced the closure of its third fund at ₹2,100 crore.
Currently, around 40 per cent of the corpus has already been invested in various companies, including Celcius, Agraga, Eggoz, ZestIot, Snitch, GradRight, Flexifyme, Beatoven.ai and Dhruva Space. Moreover, the fund has made follow-on investments from its previous fund in companies like LendBox, Miko, Biryani By Kilo, BlueStone and others.
The capital for the third fund has been raised from domestic limited partners, leading Indian institutions, the IIT Alumni Trust and a few family offices. Nearly 60 per cent of the fund have come from the existing investors of IvyCap Ventures in Funds I and II.
With this closing, the total assets under management (AUM) of IvyCap Ventures has grown to ₹5,000 crore ($600 million).
Seed-stage investments
With this new fund, Ivy Ventures plans to invest in about 25 companies at Series-A with an average starting investment amount of ₹30- ₹50 crore.
While, nearly 20 per cent of the fund will be invested in the existing portfolio companies of IvyCap Ventures, where IvyCap Ventures will act as a co-investor when those companies are raising their next rounds and will not provide secondary funding to their previous funds.
Additionally, ₹100 crore has been earmarked for investment in seed-stage companies through a separate team leveraging the IvyCamp platform, collaborating with various partners such as IITs, IIMs, incubation centers, accelerators, corporates and other platforms.
Investment distribution
Overall, the fund will focus on high-growth companies across sectors with strong potential, scalable business models and solid entrepreneurs offering differentiated value propositions.
In 2014, IvyCap launched its maiden fund with a corpus of ₹240 crore, and invested in 10 companies, while Fund II was more-than-double the size at ₹530 crore.
IvyCap Ventures has achieved cash returns for its investors in previous funds. The Fund I had delivered close to a 3X Distribution of Cash to Paid-in Capital (DPI), while Fund II has seen a 0.4X DPI, with most exits occurring through mergers and acquisitions including Clovia, which was acquired by Reliance, Sokrati - acquired by Dentsu International and others.
Diverse portfolio
“We owe this achievement to the trust our investors have bestowed on us across our funds. We are very fortunate to have an incredible team who have been with IvyCap Ventures along its journey. We are also grateful to our advisory board, for their unwavering support since the inception of IvyCap Ventures. We have always believed in the potential of domestic capital and feel fortunate for the invaluable backing of India’s leading institutional investors across all funds,” said Vikram Gupta, Founder and Managing Partner, IvyCap Ventures.
Founded in 2011, IvyCap Ventures has a portfolio of 50 companies across sectors including HealthTech, ConsumerTech, DeepTech (SaaS, AI/ML, IoT), FinTech, EdTech and emerging sectors like AgriTech and SpaceTech.