Venture capital and private equity company, Merak Ventures, has launched its first fund with a target corpus of $100 million. It plans to invest this in around 18 startups within four years.

The sector-agnostic, early-stage venture fund will focus on B2B and emerging technologies companies that are solving real problems and creating large-scale impact. These include climate tech, agritech, mobility, climate finance, insurtech and enterprise Software as a Service startups.

Former GrowX Ventures partners Manu Rikhye and Sheetal Bahl founded Merak Ventures where they managed a $25 million early-stage fund. They will continue to manage 16 companies from the company’s Fund I, which include Progcap, Pixxel and Cynlr. 

Rikhye hoped to raise one-fourth of the corpus for the first close, who will comprise existing investors. Additionally, the company will approach institutional investors. The PE company's venture partners include Quandl's co-founder Abraham Thomas, Roche India's Chief Strategy Officer Sheetal Ranganathan and Claro Energy's co-founder Soumitra Mishra

India is home to over 3,000 deep-tech start-ups and this sector has been growing at a 53 per cent CAGR over the last decade. Over one-third of these comprise those offering solutions for enterprise tech and BFSI, according to a report that National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) released in partnership with Zinnov.

"Deep-tech start-ups have the potential to significantly drive our $5-trillion economy dreams ahead by creating a massive impact across all levels of the India story," said Pari Natarajan, CEO of Zinnov.