An initial investment of Rs 100 crore and a final corpus of Rs 200 crore are planned for the new fund, which was approved by Sebi. From Specialised Invest’s portfolio of early-stage businesses, it will invest in “winners.” Speciale Invest launches a follow-on investment fund worth Rs 200 crore.
The Speciale Invest Growth Fund I’s initial close of Rs 100 crore has been announced by the early-stage venture capital investment company. It will complete the funding at Rs 200 crore in 2023 with a focus on deep research and enterprise solutions.
According to Vishesh Rajaram, Managing Partner at Speciale Invest, the fund would take part in follow-on fundraising rounds for a select group of its portfolio companies that are looking to acquire capital and are in the Series A-plus stage.
According to Rajaram, the LPs (limited partners, or investors in a fund) are not notably different from those in our prior funds, but “we have a lot of prominent corporate houses who may aid our portfolio companies with know-how.”
He noted that the fund will write checks up to $2 million in follow-on rounds for the companies now under Specialised Invest’s management. Since the funds are just meant for our victorious companies, we won’t be taking the lead in the round. At our firm, bridge rounds are not meant to be used in conjunction with the fund. We’ll look at things like customer uptake, how companies monitor their success, and other things,” he added.
In 2018, Speciale Invest, which was founded in 2017 by Vishesh Rajaram and Arjun Rao, launched its Rs 60 crore Fund I with an average deal size of $500,000 and has already achieved five early exits. The company set a goal of supporting 20 to 22 firms in the pre-seed and seed stages when it unveiled its Rs 286 crore Fund II in April 2022. Since then, around 25% of the fund has been invested.
“The Growth Fund will invest in enterprise technology startups working in the domains of AI, cloud, data, and security and extend the enterprise use case,” said Arjun Rao, General Partner at Specialised Invest.
The ePlane Company, an electric air transportation start-up incubated at IIT Madras, Ultraviolette Automotive Pvt Ltd, Agnikul Cosmos, and other companies have received funding from Specialised Invest. The fund focuses on businesses in the field of emerging technologies, including but not limited to companies in the fields of space technology, green hydrogen, robotics, batteries, quantum technology, AI-driven SaaS (software-as-a-service), development tools, data infrastructure, and large language model applications.
