9Unicorns is on a mission to help India's startups, announces third close at $40 mn

Mumbai-based sector agnostic fund 9Unicorns has just announced the third close of its first accelerator fund at $40 million with more than three dozen additional deals. 9Unicorns, from the stable of Venture Catalysts (VCats), has a total fund size of $70 million, and the idea is to invest in 150 startups over the next one year. 9Unicorns has already committed investments in about 40 startups within seven months of its first close. Among these, 25 per cent of startups have raised bigger investments in a range of 2X to 4X valuation.

With its focus on Deep Tech, B2B SaaS, media, FinTech, InsureTech, HealthTech, EduTech, logistics, etc, its portfolio includes video shopping platform Toch.ai, financing firm Klub, ferti lity care provider Janani, marketing automation firm ExtraaEdge, audio production automation firm Deepsync, D2C lifestyle footwear brand Monrow, and the EduTech startup Qin1. Dr Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, founder of 9Unicorns, said, “We have made our third close much before our set target and are looking to make the final close soon, to propel an already thriving startup economy.

The agility and speed at which we raise and deploy our funds differentiate us from others.” 9Unicorns typically invests around $150,000 for five to seven per cent equity per idea stage startup. As of December 2020, it had syndicated over Rs 240 crore, with co-investors such as Sequoia Surge, Titan Capital, SOSV, Lightspeed, Matrix Partners, Nexus Ventures among others.


The syndication also includes some of the country’s leading “super angels”: Ritesh Agarwal, Pankaj Chaddah, Anand Chandrasekaran, Ramakant Sharma, Amrish Rau, Harsh Shah, Maninder Gulati, Vikalp Sahni, Sanjiv Bajaj, etc. Backed by global VCs and LPs, 9Unicorns’s USP lies in the fact that it allows startups to tap into its vast Indian business communities in cities beyond the metros, immediately enabling them to go pan-India.