Saama Capital, a venture capital firm that has been an investor in unicorns such as and Snapdeal, has raised around $31 million for its third venture capital fund.
“With the new fund we will be investing between $2 million to $5 million at a stretch in each company. We ideally look at a company which raises close to $2.5 million in Series A with 100-150% reserved for the follow-on rounds,” said Ash Lilani, Managing Partner at Saama Capital.
The angel-friendly fund will also look to co-invest in early stage companies, he said.
Saama, which has also made several non-tech investments like Chai Point and Raw Pressery, expects to make a final close by third quarter of 2016. It expects to raise $60-80 million in the ongoing round, said a person familiar with the development.
Lilani declined to comment on the corpus being targeted for the fund. Saama had said, “As per our filing to the SEC, for Saama Capital III, the total offering amount is $50 million and the total amount sold was $30.33 million till 27 April, 2016. Beyond this, I am not in a position to discuss anything regarding fund raising.”
Saama has already invested in six companies as part of its third fund. They include LendingKart, Eazydiner, Veeba Foods, Jifflenow, Raw Pressery and an undisclosed company.
“With this fund our focus so far has been on software as a service (SaaS) companies and food companies focused on supply chain. We are also watching the financial technology space in the business-to-consumer segment,” said Lilani.
He said the largest investments made by Saama have been in two lending companies focused on Small and Medium Enterprises with offline and online distribution strategies — Vistaar Finance and LendingKart, respectively.
Saama had previously raised $54 million for its first fund and then $26 million for the second fund. It exited Snapdeal last year apart from selling stakes in TutorVista, Sula Vineyards, App Labs and Prizm Payment Services.
The new fund comes at a time when investments into Indian startups have slowed down, as most VC firms are in a wait and watch mode regarding their portfolio companies.
But investors remain bullish on the long-term prospects of Indian startups, and seven VC firms have raised nearly $2.6 billion in new funds since 2015. Sequoia Capital recently closed its $920-million fund and Accel India is expected to hit the road for a new fund that will be larger than its previous $305-million corpus.
Source: The Economic Times
