Mohandas Pai, Patni Brothers Launch Rs 125-crore Venture Fund Targeting Products

With focus on early-stage product innovation startups in India, Ideaspring Capital, an early stage venture fund by entrepreneurs and for entrepreneurs, on Monday (25 April) announced its official launch in Bengaluru. The Rs 125 crore fund aims to build and grow global scale product innovation companies from inception. An initial corpus of Rs 50 crore will be deployed as a seed fund to invest in early-stage ventures with an additional allocation of Rs 50 crore for pre-series A or series A rounds.

Aarin Capital’s Mohandas Pai and Sasken Communication Technologies CMD Rajiv Mody have joined Patni Computers’ Arihant Patni and Amit Patni, and angel investors Naganand Doraswamy and Prashant Deshpande to lead the fund. Aarin Capital is the anchor investor.

“Though funding in the business-to-consumer (B2C) space is said to be drying out, there seems to be an uptick in the business-to-business (B2B) funding space,” Aarin Capital’s Pai said.

 The fund will work with entrepreneurs having deep technical and domain expertise, developing early stage enterprise products in major cities across India. Intellectual property in the form of algorithms and deep technology will be a key differentiator, Ideaspring Capital said in a statement.

Some of the key areas that the fund will focus on include Machine Learning & Deep Learning, Computer Vision & Image Processing, Big Data Analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), Augmented & Virtual Reality, HealthTech, and FinTech.

Through its ‘Startup Assist’ program, Ideaspring Capital will help startups to build scale in product management, customer management, and building products for a global footprint.

Ideaspring Capital will invest up to Rs 3 crore in seed funding and subsequent co-investment at series A stage of up to Rs 5 crore. It will invest in only 4-6 startups a year for an engagement period of 12-18 months after which it expects the company to be able to raise the next round of funding.

“We see immense growth potential for enterprise product innovation from India and are confident that India’s next wave of innovation will come from this space. Ideaspring Capital is a coming together of entrepreneurs and investors with rich experience to partner with entrepreneurs who are re-imagining technology to enable a better world,” said Naganand Doraswamy, Managing Director & CEO, Ideaspring Capital.