The early-stage venture capital company plans to invest this in 18 start-ups within four years
Venture capital and private equity company, Merak Ventures, has launched its first fund with a target corpus of $100 million. It plans to invest this in around 18 startups within four years.
The sector-agnostic, early-stage venture fund will focus on B2B and emerging technologies companies that are solving real problems and creating large-scale impact. These include climate tech, agritech, mobility, climate finance, insurtech and enterprise Software as a Service startups.
Former GrowX Ventures partners Manu Rikhye and Sheetal Bahl founded Merak Ventures where they managed a $25 million early-stage fund. They will continue to manage 16 companies from the company’s Fund I, which include Progcap, Pixxel and Cynlr.
Rikhye hoped to raise one-fourth of the corpus for the first close, who will comprise existing investors. Additionally, the company will approach institutional investors. The PE company's venture partners include Quandl's co-founder Abraham Thomas, Roche India's Chief Strategy Officer Sheetal Ranganathan and Claro Energy's co-founder Soumitra Mishra
India is home to over 3,000 deep-tech start-ups and this sector has been growing at a 53 per cent CAGR over the last decade. Over one-third of these comprise those offering solutions for enterprise tech and BFSI, according to a report that National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) released in partnership with Zinnov.
"Deep-tech start-ups have the potential to significantly drive our $5-trillion economy dreams ahead by creating a massive impact across all levels of the India story," said Pari Natarajan, CEO of Zinnov.
The initiative will cover over 100 educational institutions in 30 districts over 60 days
This acquisition comes on the heels of the edtech unicorn’s launch of a $100 million investment war-chest in June this year
It issued 50,27,273 Compulsorily Convertible Preference Shares to Lathe Investment Pte Ltd, giving it 25 per cent equity in Hector Beverages