Kae Capital launched a $25 million fund in 2012; 13 years later, Porter and HealthKart had helped it deliver more than 5x returns

Nov. 11, 2025. Kae Capital, an early-stage venture firm in India, said two of the first companies it backed, Porter and HealthKart, have together returned its first fund multiple times over. The firm launched that fund, Fund I, in 2012 with $25 million.

Kae says recent secondary sales gave Porter’s returns a big lift. A secondary sale is when an early investor sells shares to another buyer instead of waiting for the company to go public or be acquired. Porter has now returned more than twice the size of the fund. HealthKart has returned the full fund by itself, and Kae says it still holds shares with room to grow.

Two early bets have paid back Kae Capital’s first fund several times over

Fund I put money into 32 companies in India and the US. It was split into two vehicles. The India vehicle has fully exited, with a DPI of 3.6x as of September 2023. DPI stands for distributions to paid-in capital, which means the cash handed back to investors compared with what they put in.

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A 3.6x DPI means investors got back $3.60 for every $1 invested. The overseas vehicle is on track to pass 5x DPI, according to Kae.

Sasha Mirchandani, a founding partner, called the result top decile. He pointed out that seed investing was close to unheard of in India when the fund was raised.

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Other names in the portfolio include 1MG, now India’s largest online pharmacy and part of the Tata group, and Certa, a global compliance and risk platform. Fynd, formerly Shopsense, was bought by Reliance. Dailyround, Airwoot and Eventifier also made the list of notable outcomes.

Kae says companies in Fund I went on to raise more than $900 million in follow-on funding, created over 56,000 jobs, and built about $2.7 billion in enterprise value.

Fund II backed Zetwerk, a manufacturing platform that Kae says is heading toward a public listing. It also backed Nazara, which the firm describes as India’s first listed gaming unicorn, and Snapmint, a buy-now-pay-later and embedded finance company.

Fund III, launched in 2022, includes Traya, Foxtale and RecommerceX. Kae says all three are growing fast. It is still early for that fund, so there are no return numbers to report.

Across all three funds, Kae says it has backed 90 startups and three unicorns. It puts the combined enterprise value of its portfolio at $7.7 billion and says those companies have attracted more than $2 billion in follow-on capital. Five of them have crossed $100 million in revenue. The firm also says its work has added tens of thousands of jobs in India.

All of these figures come from Kae itself. The announcement does not include outside verification.

Kae listed four lessons from Fund I. The first is patience; good companies take time, and staying invested through slow years often decides the outcome. The second is that resilience matters more than momentum, since markets and business models change and lasting founders adapt without losing their basics. The third is putting founders first. When things break, Kae says, trust matters more than the market or the model, and honest early conversations save more companies than strategy does. The fourth is that strong teams are the real advantage, and founders who can disagree well tend to last longer.

Pranav Goel, a co-founder of Porter, said Kae’s steady support in hard times helped the team cut through the noise and focus on building. Amrit Acharya, a co-founder of Zetwerk, said Kae stayed useful from the first round through COVID and the company’s growth.

Kae says it is one of the few venture firms in India that tracks founder net promoter score, and that its score is 88%. Gaurav Chaturvedi, a partner, said the firm sees Fund I’s results as the start of something and not the end.