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Early stage venture capital firm Ventureast has scaled down the target of its sixth fund — Ventureast Proactive Fund II (VPF II) — to $80 million from its originally envisaged target of $100 million.
Ventureast, which manages assets of over $400 million, expects to announce the final close of the fund by the month end.
Scaling down
“The reason for scaling down the fund size is because the last Limited Partner (LP) had a lot of riders and wanted more time to participate. Since our first investment from the fund was made in September 2016, it would have been unfair to keep the other LPs waiting,” Srikanth Sundararajan, Partner, Ventureast, told BusinessLine.
VPF II is backed by seven institutional investors mainly from Europe and a couple from India.
Sectors of interest
“We plan to do 20 deals (investments) with VPF II over its 10-year life cycle and have already closed 11 deals. Another 3-4 deals are in the pipeline. We will continue to deploy the rest of the fund over the next 18-24 months,” he said.
While the previous version of this fund, VPF I, was focused on investing in companies where technology was an enabler; VPF II is focused on start-ups where technology is the primary differentiator that helps to serve the 100 million people in smaller towns by leveraging the Cloud, IoT, Big Data Analytics, AI, Mobile, etc.
“We do not do many seed investments, but, if we do, they are in the half a million dollar range. Our sweet spot is pre-Series A investments of about $1.5 million and Series A investments of about $2.5-3 million, and these are co-invested with one or more institutions,” he said.
Some of VPF II’s investee companies are eKincare that provides telemedicine and clinical expertise with 24/7 access to doctors; Indus OS, which has a localised smartphone operating system, designed to enable the next 100 million smartphone users; BoonBox, an assisted rural e-commerce platform that provides an end-to-end solution to MFIs that finance consumer durable purchase for rural customers; ZipGo, which addresses the acute shortage of reliable and comfortable urban mass transport services for daily commuters at affordable prices.
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