Girish Mathrubootham and Manav Garg launch $85 Mn VC fund for SaaS startups

Freshworks founder Girish Mathrubootham and Manav Garg, founder and CEO of cloud platform Eka Software have launched a venture capital fund “Together” with a corpus of $85 million to back early-stage SaaS startups being built in India or by Indian founders.

Apart from Mathrubootham and Garg, Shubham Gupta, who led SaaS deals at Matrix Partners until last year, and Avinash Raghava, a former iSpirt and Nasscom fellow, have also joined Together as its founders. 

The fund has raised capital from a network of 150 founders and operators across India and Silicon Valley including the likes of Cred founder Kunal Shah, Unacademy’s Gaurav Munjal and Browserstack’s co-founder Ritesh Arora, among others. 

The fund will invest from $250,000 to $3M in a seed, pre-A or Series A round and at the get go will focus on SaaS companies. However, “when we meet exceptional founders who we are excited about partnering with, we are agnostic to the domain and market,” the fund said on its website. 

The founders of the fund will also take up a board seat in a startup they invest in at a Series A stage.

“While I will not be actively making investments, I will definitely be backing founders I see potential in, and will actively help them build connections and benefit through the Together Platform,” Raghava said about his role.  

Every founder the fund backs will be empanelled on an exclusive platform — which will function as a hub to interact and partner with other founders in the community, as well as a source of peer-to-peer learning and tribal knowledge, Raghava explained. 

On the subject of choosing a founder that the fund will eventually invest in, Together’s founders said that “we have to feel good about our chemistry with the founder and her team at a minimum.”

“We also try to look for signs of founder-market-fit - does the founder have decent domain knowledge and an informed opinion on the future of this market? Is this market large enough to make it worth winning and if so, is this founder ambitious enough to want to scale and win at a global level?” it added.