Helion Venture Partners’ Managing Director Rahul Chandra has floated a new venture capital called Unitary Helion, which is planning to raise a $100 million fund focused on deals in the financial technology space.
The move comes as Helion Venture Partners, which raised over $600 million backing e-Tailers like BigBasket and ShopClues, stopped new investments last year after its team decided to go their separate ways.
Unitary Helion plans to make the first close of the fund by October at about $40 million, post which it will start investing. Besides family offices, it is also in talks with “several strategic investors in the financial services space and banks” to raise the initial amount. The firm plans to add another partner and a principal after the first close.
Unitary Helion plans to invest in early-stage start-ups, building a portfolio of 18 to 20 companies, cutting cheques of $2-5 million on an average. The fund will invest about half of the corpus in financial technology space, targeting companies that are building different types of payment layers upon which lending services can be built up.
“Payment is very important for lending in India because bulk of the borrowers will not have collateral,” said Chandra. Other areas of focus will be digital marketplaces in areas like agriculture, logistics and healthcare.
It has roped in Jonathan Hsu, Head of data science at Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm Social Capital, as a special advisor.
Hsu will help Unitary Helion, which also plans to appoint a data science head, to build in-house data analytics tools for all vertical focus areas. Other advisors on board include Sanjeev Aggarwal and Ashish Gupta, both Senior Managing Directors at Helion, who Chandra worked with for over a decade. The trio will also continue to manage Helion’s existing portfolio of 35 companies.
Aggarwal is setting up a venture capital firm with Infosys Co-Founder Nandan Nilekani to invest in more mature startups, while Gupta plans to continue making seed investments in a personal capacity. Helion had announced plans to raise its fourth fund of $300 million in early 2015, but those plans were put on hold after three of its partners left to float investment firm Stellaris Venture Partners. In 2016, the firm decided to scrap its plans for a new venture fund as the remaining partners decided to go their own ways.
An MBA from UC Berkeley and engineer from BITS Pilani, Chandra was one of the cofounders of Helion in 2006. Before Helion, he was working in Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm Walden International before which he worked as a banker at Lazard India.
Chandra has an experience of 17 years in the venture capital business and has backed over 30 start-ups, including legal process outsourcing firm UnitedLex, smartphone-based payments device maker Ezetap and travel app RailYatri.
Source: The Economic Times
