Seed stage venture capital firm Speciale Invest has announced the final close of its second fund at Rs 286 crore. This is more than twice the expected corpus of Rs 100 crore announced at the time of launch in April, 2021.
The fund, which primarily invests in deep science and enterprise technology across India and Asia, will now look to invest in more than 20 early-stage startups through pre-seed and seed rounds with the average cheque sizes ranging from $100,000 to $ 1 million.
Speciale Invest is focused on investing in startups building enterprise software products (including SaaS), developers tools and frontier technologies such as climate, advanced materials, space tech, robotics, photonics, alternative energy and more.
While the majority of the private equity and venture capital fundraises over the past five years have been sector agnostic, it is only in recent years that fundraising by technology or internet-dedicated funds as well as clean energy-related funds has picked up, according to the IVCA-EY report.
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Founded in 2017 by Vishesh Rajaram and Arjun Rao, Speciale Invest backs entrepreneurs who use disruptive technologies to find innovative solutions that make an impact.
Since raising the first fund in 2018, Speciale Invest has invested in 18 startups with an average deal size of sub $0.5 million. Its portfolio includes Agnikul, The ePlane Company, CynLr, Qnu Labs, GalaxEye Space, Wingman, StreamAlive, Airboxr, Trainn, Uravu Labs, among others.
With the final close of the second fund, Speciale Invest indicates that a larger corpus allows for more follow-on allocation and the opportunity to double down on the winners within its portfolio.
"The oversubscribed closure of our second fund reaffirms the opportunity ahead for DeepTech in India and our commitment towards working with entrepreneurs to solve hard technology problems for the world from India!” said Vishesh Rajaram, Managing Partner at Speciale Invest.
