Growth capital fund Fundamentum has raised $20 million from CDPQ (La Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec), a Canadian institutional investor. This investment is also the CDPQ’s maiden investment in any venture fund in India.
Besides contributing to the $100 million projected fund, CDPQ will also explore direct investments in the Bengaluru-based VC firm’s portfolio companies.
Fundamentum eyes Series B and C rounds (later stage growth capital rounds) in consumer Internet and B2B companies serving global entities across sectors including travel, retail, and logistics.
With this the round, it has raked in $70 million total investment from external investors. Remaining $30 million would be coming from partners – Nandan Nikelani and Sanjeev Aggarwal.
The aforementioned corpus can be extended to $200 million. At the time of launch, the fund said to be making the investment in two-three startups each year with an average ticketsize in the range of $15 to $25 million.
Also Read: Nandan Nilekani, Sanjeev Aggarwal launch $100 mn start-up Fundamentum
Besides CDPQ, Nilekani, and Aggarwal, Fundamentum also has on-boarded six entrepreneurs to invest and mentor its portfolio companies.
A phenomenal rise of local VC firms in India
While the current investment scenario in India is being dominated by SAT (SoftBank, Alibaba, and Tencent) trio, over the past couple of years several venture capital firms have come up to invest in early and mid-stage startups.
Recently, early-stage firm Venture Gurukool launched VC fund with a total corpus of $20 million. Last year, Rahul Chandra, Co-founder and Managing Director of Helion Venture Partners, announced an early stage fund, Unitary Helion with a target corpus of $100 million.
Launched in early last year, Stellaris Venture Partners had brought Cisco Investment as an investor. It also counts local IT outsourcing major Infosys and SAP as LPs.
In 2016 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
Led by erstwhile Matrix Partners India managing director Rishi Navani – Epiq is another local VC that made debut with a focus to provide liquidity to early-stage backers and employees through investing in the secondary transaction.
A month ago, Apollo Hospitals partnered IBM to float a fund with corpus up to $10 million to make investments in the healthcare sector.
The news was first reported by ET.
