Verlinvest on board as anchor investor in Spring Capital

NEW DELHI: Spring Marketing Capital has roped in Belgian investment holding company Verlinvest as an anchor investor in its maiden fund.

The Mumbai-headquartered branding and marketing-focused firm, which will also invest in early-stage, consumer-facing startups, was launched last year by Raja Ganapathy, the former chief marketing officer of Sequoia Capital India, along with two seasoned advertising professionals — Vineet Gupta, ex-group chief executive of DDB Mudra and Arun Iyer, former chairman of Lowe Lintas.

Spring Marketing Capital’s Sebi-registered, Category-II fund, which has a target corpus of $30 million, also has other prominent investors, including Abhay Pandey, general partner at consumer focused venture capital firm A91 Partners and Amrish Rau, former PayU India chief executive, as its Limited Partners.


“We back entrepreneurs who are creating a new consumer revolution by using brand as their main tool,” Arjun Anand, principal at Verlinvest, the investment holding company of the founders of global beverages giant Anheuser-Busch, told ET.

“We typically look for authentic and passionate brand stories, and highly entrepreneurial partners to work with. We saw a huge like mindedness between what Verlinvest does, and what Spring Capital is doing with their maiden fund,” Anand added.

Verlinvest, which has largely made direct investments in India and counts companies such as Byju’s, Veeba, Epigamia and Future Retail among its portfolio, has also backed certain funds, including those operated by Everstone Capital and DSG Consumer Partners.

“The core proposition of the firm is to partner with founders to build the brands of tomorrow,” Ganapathy, founding partner, Spring Capital, told ET.