Artha Venture Fund makes first close at Rs 40 crore

MUMBAI: Early stage venture capital firm Artha Venture Fund (AVF) has achieved the first close of its maiden fund having raised Rs 40 crore. Artha Venture Fund I, which received the approval of the Securities and Exchange Board of India in March this year, will have a corpus of Rs 200 crore along with a greenshoe option of Rs 100 crore.

The fund, which is structured as a Category I alternative investment fund, will invest in startups across seed, pre-series A and series-A levels of growth.

The first close saw participation from listed companies, domestic family offices and HNIs.


This is the maiden fund of the Artha Group which is cosponsored by Singularity Holdings and Artha India Ventures, the family offices of stock market veterans, Madhusudan Kela, Ashok Kumar Damani and Ramesh Damani. AVF is looking to raise the remaining portion of the fund over the next 6-12 months and will look to onboard global institutional investors and HNIs as limited partners in the fund.

ET was the first to report the launch of Artha India Ventures’ new fund of Rs 200 crore in June last year.

Artha Venture Fund will invest between Rs 10-15 crore through the life cycle of a firm’s investment across the three stages, with 50-60% of the fund earmarked for follow-on rounds.

Artha’s first investment from the fund was made in peer-to-peer lending firm LenDen Club and the fund is looking to close four investments by the quarter ending September 2018.

“We intend to make 8-10 new seed investments each year,” Anirudh Damani, founder of Artha Venture Fund told ET. “We are seeing very encouraging signs of a pick up with a much better crop of entrepreneurs, better business dynamics and better execution at the early stage. Hence, we intend to make 8-10 new seed investments each year,” he added.

Artha’s new fund comes at a time when seed stage funding continues to struggle with the first half of 2018 recording the lowest ever half yearly deals in the last 4 years. Early stage deals in seed and angel investments saw a massive 45% drop at 227 deals compared to 411 deals struck in the first half of last year with only $137.8 million invested in seed stage as compared to over $200.1 million in the first six months of 2017, data from Tracxn shows.

AVF is looking to build a portfolio around consumption and will focus on investing in startups across the consumer brand space as also consumption enablers in finance, consumer resolution, blockchain and B2B services space.