Alibaba, Myntra, and GE execs together start $50 Mn fund - Multiply Ventures

It is not the first time that we’re coming across a news article that talks about top executives from leading Indian startups getting together to start their own funds and contribute to the ecosystem that made them who they are. In fact, in the past one year, there have been several such incidents taking place with the increase in the number of secondary deals and ESOP encashments.

The newest of these firms is Multiply Ventures. Raveen Sastry, Myntra co-founder, Bhushan Patil, former President and Paytm and ex-top exec at Alibaba, and Sanjay Ramakrishnan, ex-GM at GE and former Sr. Director at Flipkart have joined hands to start the $50 million fund.

Multiply Ventures will invest in early-stage startups - mostly Pre-Series A and Series A rounds of enterprises focussing on segments like new retail, edtech, fintech. Out of the $50 million first corpus, the firm has already received commitments for about $10 million from the colleagues of the three co-founders, reports ET.

Mukesh Bansal, co-founder of Myntra, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, co-founder at Paytm, and David A Steinberg, CEO at Zeta Interactive have committed to the firm their share of contributions. The fund is looking to rope in more investors from US and China.

China, where Patil had a five-year stint while working for Alibaba before he joined Paytm as a President. He quit Paytm last month itself, another exit from the cashback startup in recent days. He is expected to help the VC grow with his on-ground experience and connects in China.

Sastry and Ramakrishnan bring to the firm their experience as individual investors in more than 30 Indian startups including most recent ones like Open Financials, Mfine, Mad Street Den, and Gramophone among others.

Multiply Ventures, was founded around 3 months ago in March, going by Ramakrishnan’s LinkedIn profile and is already screening through the startups in the country to scout a potential investment.

As we said, in the beginning, it isn’t the first such venture to do add to the cycle of money flow in the startup ecosystem, when we already have several gems like 021 Ventures, Tanglin Ventures, BAce Capital; and it certainly won’t be the last of these as well.