With $30 Mn in kitty, Axilor Ventures to focus on Seed and Series A deals

The Indian startup ecosystem has been witnessing a huge flow of funds lately. Alibaba, SoftBank, Tencent, Sequoia and many others have closed multi-million dollars deals with various startups.

Yet, the investment made by these behemoths has not been sufficient for the entire ecosystem.

Experts say the multi-billion dollar deals were limited to a few platforms or these investors participated in Series D and E rounds of various companies. There is still a huge dearth of funds for early stage ventures and there are only a handful of ventures participating in Seed or pre-Series A rounds.

In an attempt to meet the basic requirements of early-stage startups, investment firm and accelerator Axilor Ventures launched a $30 million seed fund today.

With a fall in pre-Series A and Series A investments, Axilor aims to become a leader in the space.

Founded in 2014 by Infosys founders Kris Gopalakrishnan and SD Shibulal, Axilor Ventures has selected 20 startups across five categories for its sixth accelerator batch, mainly from five sectors – enterprise, artificial intelligence, consumer internet, healthcare, and fintech.

The Bengaluru-headquartered early-stage venture fund also announced its seventh accelerator batch. It will invest in all startups that are selected to be part of its cohort. The batch comprises around 20 startups.

The investment firm has allocated half of the funds to pre-seed investment and the other half will be dedicated to seed stage funding. Seed cheques will be of Rs 3 crore or more and pre-seed investment will fall in the Rs 1-2 crore range.

It plans to make around 5-7 seed investments every year, along with putting in pre-seed money in startups from the accelerator batch. Around 90 per cent of the startups that Axilor has picked for its accelerator programme were bootstrapped at the time of admission.

The development was first reported by VCCircle.