Inventus India, an early-stage venture capital firm, has launched a new fund with a target corpus of 9 billion rupees (US $120 million). Athera Venture Partners is the new name for the firm.
Athera stated it will invest in up to 20 pre-series A and series A tech businesses in developing tech sectors including IoT, SaaS, enterprise software, finance, and Web3 with Fund IV. The cash will be used in the following three months.
Its investment checks will typically be between $640,000 and $5 million in size. The VC company will also support future rounds of the fund’s portfolio.
“With our new fundraise, we wish to literally triple down on the startup ecosystem in India that is on a bullish growth trajectory,” Rutvik Doshi, general partner at Athera, said in a statement.
Athera started its investment journey in 2008 with its first fund worth US $51 million, through which it invested in 18 companies. The deployment of its second fund, which saw US $106 million in dedicated capital, began in 2013 and saw investments in 24 startups, the firm told as per reports.
The first two incarnations were cross-border funds, meaning the VC company put money into both US and Indian businesses. The third fund, on the other hand, was solely dedicated to the Indian startup environment.
In 2018, it began investing from the third fund, which had a size of US $47.5 million. The fund has so far invested in 12 firms.
Euler Motors, PlayShifu, Pixxel, HealthifyMe, Tricog, and MoveInSync are among the 23 companies in Athera’s current portfolio.
It also invested in PolicyBazaar, which went public last year, and redBus, which Naspers bought. In 2013, the VC company departed redBus, and in 2019 and 2021, it made partial exits from PolicyBazaar.
The launch of Athera’s new fund comes as investments in India’s startup ecosystem are falling due to fears about the economic slump.
According to reports, Indian entrepreneurs raised $1.6 billion in April, about half of what they raised the same month last year. While the production of unicorns has slowed, some firms have had to lay off employees.
The VC company, on the other hand, seems unfazed by the bleak forecast.
