Cisco invests in Series A oriented VC fund Stellaris Venture Partners

Ritesh Banglani, Alok Goyal, and Rahul Chowdhri-led venture capital firm Stellaris Venture Partners has secured an unknown sum from Cisco Investment. The corporate investor is the third major corporate to join Stellaris as a backer.

Homegrown IT major Infosys and SAP have already on-boarded as partners in the Bengaluru-based fund.

Almost a year ago, the Series A oriented VC firm had claimed to be raising $100 million maiden fund with capital commitments from financial institutions, corporates, entrepreneurs, and family offices in the United States, Europe, and Asia.

Cisco investment fund infusion is a part of aforementioned $100 million corpus. In February last year, it had reportedly raised $50 million from limited partners (LPs), including SIDBI.

Launched in early last year, Stellaris Venture Partners has funded about four startups including on-demand doctor consultation platform mFine, SaaS-based staff communication platform Noticeboard, enterprise-focused SaaS support platform Whatafix and mobile-centric B2B marketplace WYDR.

Stellaris focuses on tech businesses solving India-specific problems. The VC firm targets companies focusing on the next 300 million Internet users in India, targeting small businesses. With nine members team, Stellaris invests in core enterprise space such as cloud, IoT, machine learning, enterprise applications, and analytics.

Meanwhile, one of the biggest India specific funds Sequoia Capital India is reportedly planning to raise $1 billion worth corpus. This will be the sixth India-focused fund for the US-based investor.

Last year, the Indian startup ecosystem witnessed the launch of various funds such as Stellaris, Pravega VC, Fundamentum and Fireside venture, among a few others.

While ex SAIF Partner’s principal Mukul Singhal and Rohit Jain had started early-stage investment firm Pravega VC with $30 million corpus to invest in early-stage startups, Nandan Nilekani and Helion Venture’s Sanjeev Aggarwal launched investment fund called Fundamentum with a corpus of $100 million to back startups looking for growth capital.

Led by erstwhile Matrix Partners India managing director Rishi Navani - Epiq is one of the new investments firms that made debut in Indian startup ecosystem last year. It aims to provide liquidity to early-stage backers and employees through investing in the secondary transaction.

The development was first reported by ET.