The Startup India initiative may well get a head start with investors showing an appetite to create additional venture funds in the country. Former Infosys Board member T V Mohandas Pai, one of India’s foremost angel investors, is finalising a family office fund which will look at seed funding tech startups. He is looking to raise a corpus of Rs 100 crore.
Pai, who had been ranked as the number one angel investor in India in 2015 even ahead of Ratan Tata with 18 different investments, is looking to position it as a “deep involvement fund”, going beyond just financial commitment. The family office will also look to provide strategic inputs.
The fund will look at companies in the areas of financial services, education, healthcare and in advanced technology segments such as analytics, automation etc. Pai’s eldest son Pranav Pai is a Stanford graduate and working at tech startup in Chicago. Pai did not want to divulge further details at this stage.
Family offices have been one of the key investment vehicles in the Indian startup eco-system, more so in Bengaluru.
The city already has prominent family offices such as PremjiInvest of Wipro chairman Azim Premji, Catamaran Ventures of Infosys founder N R Narayana Murthy and Nadathur Holdings of N S Raghavan, also a co-founder of Infosys. These family offices have been one of the early investors in the entrepreneurial eco-system with investments cutting across the various stages of growth.
Pai, who left Infosys in June, 2011 has become an active investor in the startup and technology landscape in the country. He co-founded Aarin Capital, a $100 million venture capital fund along with Ranjan Pai, CEO of Manipal Education and Medical Group. He is also part of Exfinity Ventures, a B2B venture fund started along with his former Infosys colleague V Balakrishnan, former Wipro CEO Girish Paranjpe and former i-flex Solutions CEO Deepak Ghaisas.
Besides, he has made a series of angel investments totalling 18 such ventures in 2015 including the likes of Kaaryah Lifestyle Solutions, Zoomcar, and Jigsaw Academy Education etc. India has already become the third largest startup hub globally with a presence of over 4,200 companies. In the last two-three years, the startup momentum has picked up pace as evident from the funding into this segment which has grown by 125% from $2.2 billion in 2014 to $4.9 billion in 2015, according a report by Nasscom.
This is much higher as compared to the cumulative funding of $3.2 billion in 2010-14 period. The total numbers of active investors have also grown from 220 in 2014 to 490 in 2015.
Source: The Financial Express
