Seed venture fund backed by Mohandas Pai, Dr. Ranjan Pai & Pramod Saxena completes fundraising at INR 36 crore with new investors including Anil Rai Gupta (Havells), Harsh & Rishabh Mariwala (Marico) and Ajay Parekh (Pidilite) among others.
10 April 2015. Bangalore, India: Unitus Ventures, India’s leading venture seed fund supporting startups innovating for the masses, announced it has completed fundraising for Unitus Ventures India, its first SEBI-registered seed fund with a total corpus of INR 36 crore. Unitus has also raised an offshore seed fund creating a combined corpus of INR 140 crore ($23 million) for investing exclusively in India. This significantly exceeds Unitus’ original target of $15 million, indicating strong demand from both global and domestic investors. To date, Unitus has announced 16 investments in India in sectors including healthcare, education, mobile, e-commerce, retail & agriculture. Unitus expects to invest in another 12-16 companies with these funds.
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Unitus Ventures Closes Fundraising for India Fund |
Unitus’ Fund Addressing an Investing Market Gap in India
The Unitus Group has been investing in India since 2005 focussing on early-stage venture investing in frontier sectors ahead of most investors. Unitus specializes in backing entrepreneurs with high-scale potential ventures serving the low-income masses. Unitus started with investments in microfinance and expanded from there.
Founded in 2012, Unitus Ventures, invests into start-ups at the very early/“seed capital stage”, coming in as the first institutional money and often the only investor beyond the promoters. While there are a growing number of individual angel investors in India, most of them are focused on pure tech startups. Unitus is investing into startups that activate markets for the masses in areas such as healthcare and education, where there are very few angel investors and almost no other capital available. This is often referred to as the “seed funding gap” and is increasingly been recognized as an underdeveloped part of the startup financing ecosystem in India.
Prominent Indian Investors Join for the Fund’s Close
New investors in Unitus Ventures India include Anil Rai Gupta (Havells India), Harsh & Rishabh Mariwala (Marico), Krishnakumar ‘KK’ Natarajan (Mindtree), Alok Tandon (Shyam Telecom), Ajay Parekh (Pidilite), Nagarajan Balasubramanian, Vikram Gandhi (VSG Capital/Asha Impact) and Pramod Bhasin (Genpact).
“While entrepreneurs often come up with breakthrough ideas and innovations to fulfil social needs, they are hamstrung with insufficient funding, regulatory hurdles, lack of key competencies, and business models that are yet to evolve fully,” said Mr. Vikram Gandhi, Founder, Asha Impact. “Our investment in Unitus is meant to handhold such early-stage entrepreneurs, provide them with the much-needed funding and expertise, and lead them to successful commercialization and scaling up of their innovations in a win-win situation for all stakeholders.”
Joining Current India Leadership Investors
The new investors have joined with current investors in Unitus Ventures India including T.V. Mohandas Pai (Formerly Infosys CFO), Dr. Ranjan Pai (CEO of Manipal Education and Medical Group), Hemendra Kothari (DSP Blackrock), Pramod Saxena (CEO of Oxigen), Hema Hattangady (Conzerv/Schneider), Ananda Kallugadde (Neobytes), Rajeev Bakshi (MD of METRO Cash & Carry), and Ravi Venkatesan (Infosys, Microsoft, Cummins), Srikanth Iyer (former CEO of Pearson India), Kishore Musale (Astarc Group), Aroon Raman (Raman FibreScience) and other entrepreneurs and business luminaries, listed here.
Joining Offshore Leadership Investors
More than 50 leadership investors have committed to Unitus’ offshore India-focused fund, including Bill Gates (Microsoft, Gates Foundation), Desh Deshpande (formerly Sycamore Networks), Romesh Wadhwani (Symphony TG), Vinod Khosla (Khosla Ventures), Steve Singh (Cleartrip, Concur), Soma Somasegar (Microsoft), Dilip Wagle (McKinsey), Geeta Aiyer (Boston Common), Pradeep Singh (Aditi), Bharat Shah (Microsoft), Anoop Gupta (Microsoft), and Nagesh Pabbisetty (Microsoft). A number of leading foundations have also invested, including Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, Crystal Springs Foundation, Pfizer Foundation, Lemelson Foundation, Sorenson Impact Foundation, and others.
About Unitus Ventures
Unitus Ventures is the leading venture seed fund supporting startups innovating for the masses in India. Unitus invests in healthcare, education, mobile commerce & value-added services, marketplaces & e-commerce, retail & distribution, agriculture, and water & energy sectors. Founded in 2012, Unitus Ventures is part of the Unitus Group, a premier financial services group operating in India and other emerging markets since 2000. Unitus Ventures is based in Bangalore and Seattle.
