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Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani and Helion Ventures co-founder Sanjeev Aggarwal, a venture capital veteran have launched a new fund.
Called Fundamentum, the fund aims to invest in consumer technology-focussed businesses, particularly ventures that are trying to solve problems unique to India. The focus would be on scaling up start-ups, an area which India lacks.
Fundamentum will would start off with a $100-million corpus.
Further, it will lead investment rounds of $10-$25 million in companies that have attained some traction in the market and are looking to scale up, according to a company statement. These quantum of funds are considered as Series B or C round of funding.
Also, a portion of the fund’s capital will also go into investments in enterprise technology or outsourcing companies whose customers are global corporations. “While India has earned recognition as a start-up nation, it is as yet an unproven scale-up nation, and with Fundamentum, we want to help build a much needed ‘scale-up’ ecosystem in the country,” said Aggarwal.
Interestingly, Nilekani and Aggarwal will not be charging management fee or carried interest, to the fund, a practice which is regular in the investment fraternity.
Fundamentum’s team will assist portfolio founders in areas such as leadership and organisation development, building scalable technology architecture and navigating inflexion points and their acquisition strategy.
After Aadhaar, Nilekani has been making a slew of investments in start-ups. These include include ShopX, RailYatri (a venture which he has co invested with Helion), angel investment platform LetsVenture, 4TiGO, SEDEMAC and Power2SME. Additionally, Nilekani will make all the investments via Fundamentum.
Despite having a sizeable startup base of around 1,500 ventures, the ecosystem is unable to scale ventures beyond 3-4 rounds of funding, opine industry watchers.
As per a recent IBM and Oxford study, 90 per cent of the start-ups in India fail within the first five years of inception.
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