Antler India raises Rs 500 Cr for maiden fund

Early-stage investment firm Antler India has closed Rs 500 crore of its Rs 600 crore ($75 million) maiden fund and is planning to make the final close this quarter.

Domestic capital sources, including the Small Industries Development Bank of India, have provided over Rs 325 crore of the total fund raised. Governmental organizations, healthcare endowments, and Antler's international limited partners were among the fund's additional investors.

According to Antler, it will continue to invest between $200K and $400K in new portfolio companies in software-as-a-service, fintech, generative AI and startups building on large network protocols such as Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC). 

With the corpus, the fund is looking to back nearly 100 early stage startups at the idea to pre-seed stage, and will reserve a portion of the fund to double down on top portfolio performers.

Antler India said that it has already invested 20% of the total corpus from its maiden fund, making 27 investments including in Bold Finance, Covrzy and Hexo. According to Antler, of these, 13 have raised follow-on funding.

Recently, Japanese venture capital fund Incubate Fund Asia announced the first close of its third fund which has a target corpus of $50 million. In fact, last week saw four startup fund launches including Vertex Ventures, Kae Capital, Artha Group and private equity firm Xponentia.