Girish Mathrubootham, Manav Garg launch $85M fund to back early-stage software startups

Freshworks founder Girish Mathrubootham and Eka Software founder Manav Garg, on Wednesday announced the launch of their new venture fund ‘Together’ with a key focus on backing early-stage software products companies being built out of India or by Indian founders.

Setup as a global fund in Mauritius with a corpus of $85 million, Together also counts Shubham Gupta, who led SaaS deals at Matrix Partners until last year, and Avinash Raghava, a founding member of SaaSBoomi and former iSpirt and Nasscom fellow, as its founders.

Together has raised capital from a network of almost 150 entrepreneurs and startup operators from India and globally, including BrowserStack co-founder Ritesh Arora, Cred founder Kunal Shah, Capillary founder Aneesh Reddy and Unacademy’s Gaurav Munjal.



The fund is also backed by a few traditional venture capitalists and also has some institutional investors, though their names were not made public.

Mathrubootham, who has invested in over 60 startups as an angel and is also a founding member of SaaSBoomi, said that the Together fund was the next step in the journey of making India a ‘product nation’.

“We can create meaningful impact by not just bringing capital to startups but also the operating knowledge from us as well as the network of more than 150 founders and operators that we have in the Together network,” Mathrubootham added.

While Together’s core focus will be on backing SaaS startups, it will also look to back early-stage companies in sectors such as edutech, fintech and those building developer tools, which have the potential to build solutions out of India for global markets.

The fund will operate in the early-stage Seed to Series A space and will cut around 20-25 cheques of $250,000 to $3 million over the next few years, with the potential to invest in follow-on rounds, Mathrubootham and Garg told ET.

“There is a coming together of subscription-based businesses, developer tools in the B2B space. If you look at fintech, there’s a lot of application programming interface (API) infrastructure that’s coming up in India and even in ed-tech there’s the B2B side and the consumer side. That’s where we’re seeing synergies coming through,” said Garg.

While Together will operate in an already crowded space of early-stage SaaS deals, where VCs such as Accel, Sequoia Capital’s Surge, Matrix Partners and others have already made a name for themselves, Garg and Mathrubootham said the fund will differentiate itself from others as being a predominantly operator-led fund.

Calling it akin to having another co-founder, Together will look to mentor startups it backs and aid them in overcoming specific roadblocks to help them scale faster.

Garg said that the fund’s focus will be to reduce the go-to-market and scale startups more quickly, bringing down the time taken to build Unicorns like Freshworks from a decade to less than half that, which is what will be needed if India wants to build a software products ecosystem valued at over $1 trillion in the next decade.