Mumbai-based Unicorn India Ventures (UIV), an early-stage fund house with a pan India presence, has announced the first close of its Rs 1000 crore Fund III. The final close is expected by March 2024. 

With this Fund, UIV aims to build a portfolio of 25 start-ups focused on global SaaS and digital platforms, which are UIV's expertise areas. From the sector's perspective, the Fund is looking at newer sectors of climate tech, agritech, space tech, and the semiconductor ecosystem. 

Started in 2016 by Bhaskar Majumdar and Anil Joshi, UIV is a technology-focused early-stage venture fund that invests in start-ups in emerging sectors. Post the success of the First Fund, Unicorn India Ventures launched Fund II, a Rs 300 crore fund launched in 2020. 

The second Fund has a portfolio of 20 companies. With two funds under management and an active portfolio of over 35 companies, UIV has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to pick unique startups. Most of the startups within the current portfolios are already profitable or have a clear path to break even. 

With Fund III, UIV would continue with its strategy of being the “first institutional investor”. It plans to issue a first cheque of around $1 million to $2 million before investing in a follow-on round. As a part of its investment thesis, UIV invests only 20 per cent of its investible corpus to create the portfolio and the rest to back the winners of the portfolio. 

Bhaskar Majumdar, UIV's managing partner, said,  “We continue to identify innovative business models with faster scalability. The metrics for us are a clear path to profitability for the companies. Being the first institutional investors, before making any investment, we spend considerable time with the founders to understand their vision, the team’s capabilities, growth plans, and leadership style. Our focus is to invest in companies that are enablers of India’s digitisation across sectors. We avoid high cash burn businesses like D2C, consumer Internet, and content businesses.” 

Anil Joshi, managing partner at UIV says, “Our key differentiator is that we are present across India and believe that India’s start-up landscape has changed immensely over the past couple of years. With this third fund, our commitment to nurture Indian startups will be unwavering, and we will keep scouting for highly innovative companies whose disruptive solutions can address real-life problems of users by leveraging technology.” 

UIV has also announced senior hiring for Fund III. The team is joined by Bikram Mahajan as a Partner. Kamlesh Ahuja is joining as VP (fund operations) responsible for all compliance and back-office administration for all the Funds.

UIV launched its first fund with a corpus of Rs 100 crore. From its first Fund, UIV has invested in 17 companies like SmartCoin, Open Bank, Sequretek, Pharmarack, Genrobotics, Clootrack and FutureCure.