Industry veterans-backed Exfinity fund raises an additional Rs 25 crore

BANGALORE: The Exfinity venture fund, headed by industry veterans including former Infosys directors Balakrishnan V and Mohandas Pai, said its Rs 125 crore fund has been fully subscribed to.

The fund had previously closed the initial Rs 100 crore subscription in June. The investors include CXOs, reputed industrialists, family offices, professionals and ulta high net worth individuals, said Shailesh Ghorpade, one of the promoters of the fund.

“We are not looking at PowerPoint (idea) stage companies. Those that have a small revenue stream, or a minimum viable product in place will be our focus,” said Ghorpade.

The fund co-invested with Vinod Dham, the co-inventor of Intel’s Pentium chip, in a more than $4 million (Rs 24 crore) round in Silicon Valley-based Virtual Power Systems late in June.

Besides Balakrishnan, the Exfinity fund is led by Pai, a former Infosys CFO who is the chairman of Manipal Education Group, former Wipro chief executive Girish Paranjpe, former iFlex Solutions CEO Deepak Ghaisas, among others. The eight group partners have contributed Rs 24 crore in total to the fund.

The illustrious founding team has managed to attract a lot of startups, even those that see no need for funding, said Ghorpade.

“One adtech companies came to us only seeing what value the team could add,” said Ghorpade.

Ghorpade also heads Reservoir Investment Managers India that will manage assets of Exfinity. The fund said will close its investment in three companies by September.

The ticket size of investements is Rs 6-10 crore and would take a stake between 10-20% depending on what stage the investors come in.

Incidentally, both and announcement comes at a time when both the Indian IT-service giants Infosys and Wipro are keen to invest their largely dormant $100 million corpus in startups.

Recently, Vishal Sikka, Infosys’ newly appointed CEO and MD said he would like to invest in startups.