Orios Venture Partners has returned ₹300 crore from Fund 1 to its investors and anticipates a substantial increase in returns from this fund throughout the current year.

Launched in 2014 with a final close at ₹300 crore in 2015, Fund I had invested in 18 companies, with a predominant focus on health tech, consumer-tech and ecommerce. The fund looks to solidify its position with significant further returns lined up in 2024 and 2025.

According to Rehan Yar Khan, Managing Partner to early-stage funds are a long journey as they grow along with the companies they invest in. “We are glad to have returned 1x of the fund, which means the corpus invested with us is back with investors and now the upside remains. With several good companies in our portfolio, we hope to be able to deliver strongly on the upside.”

The return of capital journey in general has taken longer than planned as Covid and its aftermath disrupted both financial markets and company sales in 2020,2021, and 2022, the company said. This was a double whammy as the VC industry was nascent and had not completed one full return cycle.

“Hopefully, such black swan events will not repeat in our lifetime and from hereon for us and the VC industry the returns cycle should be fairly smooth,” added Khan.

Fund I allocated its resources with a major focus on Marketplaces, leading at 27.07 per cent, followed by D2C at 17.7 per cent, and HealthTech at 14.45 per cent. Key portfolio companies that materialized from the fund include Country Delight, Pharmeasy, Intelligence Node, and Zostel.

Looking forward Orios Venture Partners sees the India tech opportunity continue to grow strongly. “We are now investing from our fourth fund, and looking back to Fund I, we can see that opportunity for startups has grown manyfold. Tech has reached across India and into the hinterland, it has gone beyond consumer internet to B2B, SaaS, EVs, Climatetech, and to hardware,” said Khan.

Furthermore, the company is happy to see the money coming back since it gives investors the assurance they need to put their money into bigger venture capital funds, which can then capitalize on the lucrative India possibility. This is the beginning of an extended positive cycle, it added. 

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