Mumba: StartupXseed Ventures has announced the final close of its Fund II at INR 243 Cr commitment, 20% more than initially targeted. Along with top family offices and corporates, the fund also saw a participation from its Fund I investors, most of whom doubled their commitment after seeing StartupXseed’s ability to spot and back companies such as DarwinBox, CloudSEK, Bellatrix, AUS (Aarav Unmanned Systems) early. Each of them has become a vertical leader in the APAC region today.
StartupXseed believes in investing in strong founders, capable of designing enterprise solutions with a clear understanding of market barriers and the ability to sell across global markets. By investing early, they are looking at achieving higher RoI by helping start-ups leap into product development, growth strategies, geographic expansion and strengthening organizational capabilities from a nascent stage.
BV Naidu, Managing Partner at StartupXseed said that “Having expertise in the B2B segment, we have helped founders to gain commendable success and our average markup of past investments is more than 6x. Couple of Fund II LPs doubled their commitment at final close after witnessing similar growth indicators on Fund II portfolio”.
Ravi Thakur, Co-founding Partner of the fund commented “On the Investments, we primarily look at solutions where the convergence of new business models and technologies is imperative. This way, we are helping ourselves in working on next big verticals ahead of the curve. We are also spending time helping founders double to triple their Topline year on year”.
Besides the existing GPs (BV Naidu, Ravi Thakur, Sid Mookerji, Ramakrishna V, Mohan Das Pai {Represented by Aarin Capital} and V. Balakrishnan), for Fund II, StartupXseed added Dr. Krishna Mikkilineni, Ex-CTO and Board Member of Honeywell Inc as a GP. Dr. Krishna is one of the world’s leading thought leaders in the Technology space, active in the Startup eco-systems in India and United States.
StartupXseed is looking for start-ups with forward innovations in technologies related to cloud migration of brownfield projects, AI-led workflow automation, energy storage technologies for quick discharge applications, cybersecurity for APIs, AI-led ecommerce enablers and others disruptive technologies in respective markets. The typical first cheque size will be between INR 5 Cr. upto INR 12 Cr.
StartupXseed is believed to hold 100 times its investment value in DarwinBox which became a Unicorn this year. They, have already returned substantial capital back to investors of Fund I. Over the next year, they could exit some of their other portfolio companies as their valuation has risen multiple times since their first investment.
