Anthill Ventures Raising $25M to Scale Startups to Series A within 12 Months
Anthill Ventures, headquartered at T-Hub, India’s largest startup incubator, is planning to raise a $25 million dollar fund by early 2018. Founding partners of Anthill according to sources are on the lookout for investors at tech conference meccas like Web Summit. At least half the targeted corpus size is expected to be fulfilled by first quarter of 2018.
Anthilll Ventures founded in 2015 identifies itself as an investment and scaling platform for early growth stage startups that want to scale with speed in Indian markets. Their strategy is to find the right partners from across the world with access to investment funds, family offices and accelerators and then co-investing (Anthill almost never leads a funding round) along with these funds in highly scalable business ideas that have growth opportunities in Asia. In addition to an investment ranging from 100,000 to 200,000 dollars, Anthill aspires to provide mentoring, and introduction to key contacts that can help scale startups towards series A within 12 months.
Anthill has four partners: Prasad Vanga, who started the firm, and then Sailesh Sigatapu, Rajeev Menon, and Lakshmi Nambiar who joined consequentially. Prior to this Vanga and Menon both worked at Genpact, a global firm that helps businesses adopt new technologies and streamline processes. Their portfolio has around 23 startups which are largely pre-series A and B2B; some of their better known and better performing investee companies include 91springboard, Roadzen, Fundnel and ZineOne. About 60 percent of their startups are based out of India, and only two are based in Hyderabad close to the venture/accelerator firm’s main office.
Anthill has developed its own ‘Speed Scaling Platform’ which identifies startups with high Scalability Quotient – their own proprietary test based on 108 parameters - so that they can understand how much potential each startup has to scale fast.
The firm is further looking at bolstering revenue streams and its network of investors to maintain a sustained flow of funds by setting up a syndication platform targeting UHNI investors, family offices and the likes. The technology enabled platform is expected to help investors find startups, manage an investor’s portfolio, handle required documentation while helping portfolio startups access a wider network of investors and experts who can develop their business.
Vanga had told PTI in September 2017, that the firm will be looking at launching four sector-specific accelerator programmes in 2018.
