Inventus India closes Rs 369cr fund

TNN

Bengaluru: Early stage venture capital firm

Inventus Capital India

has made a final close of its new fund at Rs 369 crore, exceeding its target of Rs 325 crore. The new fund comes after the split of the India team —

Parag Dhol

, Samir Kumar and

Rutvik Doshi

— from the US team two years ago.

The fund has been backed by entrepreneurs, including MakeMyTrip’s

Deep Kalra

,

K Ganesh

of GrowthStory, Matrimony’s

Murugavel Janakiraman

and Bigbasket’s Hari Menon. Several founders of

Inventus

portfolio companies, like redBus co-founder

Phanindra Sama

, have also backed the fund.

About 70% of the corpus for the fund has been raised from India, while the rest has been mopped up from limited partners (LPs), as investors in VC funds are called, from the US, Japan, and Taiwan.

It will focus on investments of Rs 10-15 crore and is looking at newer areas like hardware and internet of things (IoT) actively, besides consumer internet and software services. It has already closed five deals, which include augmented reality based educational toys maker Playshifu and blockchain-based supply chain solutions maker Koinearth, helmet accessory maker Bluarmor and local merchant’s discovery platform LBB.

The new fund comes at a time when there is increased activity by larger venture capital firms like Sequoia Capital India, Matrix Partners India and Lightspeed at the seed stage, pushing up valuations and deal sizes. Venture firms focused on seed-stage include Blume Ventures and India Quotient, who are also in the process of raising new funds.