Former CEO of CCD (Café Coffee Day) Naresh Malhotra is creating an early-stage startup family fund along with other co-investors with a corpus of Rs 50 crore ($7.8 million).
The other lead investors in the fund include Monika Rao, co-founder of Family Doctor, and her husband Mukund Rao, founder of IT company DerivIT, which recently acquired by Swiss company Luxoft.
“We are looking at early-stage startups, could be 6 months to 12 months, or older by one to two years. It can be a product or services company, but our focus would be on helping them scale up,” said Naresh Malhotra reported ET.
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Though largely sector-agnostic, the fund would focus on tech start-ups and those that use artificial intelligence. Investments in each start-up could range from Rs 1-3 crore, and the fund is open to co-investing with other PE startup funds.
Apart from India-based companies, the fund could also invest in Indian startups that are incorporated in Singapore. They are also looking at startups in India that can cater to other South East Asian markets similar to India in some ways, but have a higher per capita revenue generation like Indonesia.
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Last month, tech entrepreneur and billionaire from Canada, Terry Matthew in a collaboration with Indian company Ideas to Impacts launched a $10 million funds for Indian startups.
The fund will give seed money for idea-stage and accelerator-stage startups in the business-to-business, software as a service space, with investment deal sizes of up to $750,000. Over the next five years, the company plans to support and mentor 30 startups.
Prior to that, Mining baron Anil Agarwal of Vedanta announced to launch a venture capital fund worth $1 billion to help young Indian entrepreneurs in the natural resources space.
Depending on the requirements, Agarwal will invest anywhere between Rs 5 crore and Rs 200 crore ($30 million) in select entities.
