Early-stage enterprise fund pi Ventures, which invests in disruptive Artificial Intelligence and DeepTech startups, has launched its second fund with a goal corpus of Rs 565 crore and a greenshoe possibility of Rs 185 crore.
The VC is trying to again round 25 world disruptors from India with this fund and has obtained approvals from Sebi.
With Fund II, pi will proceed to give attention to early-stage (seed/ pre-Series A/Series A) investments in startups targeted on disruptive AI in addition to ventures going past digital deep tech into – house applied sciences, materials science, Biotech and life sciences, the agency stated. With Fund 1, up to now pi has invested in 13 category-defining deep tech startups like Niramai, Locus, Wysa, Agnikul and Pyxis.
pi Ventures closed its Fund I of Rs 225 cr in 2017-18. Its traders embody CDC UK, IFC World Bank, SIDBI, Hero Enterprise’s Sunil Kant Munjal, Electronic Development Fund (managed by Canbank Ventures), Canada’s In Colour Capital, Accel Partners and household workplaces and entrepreneur traders Binny Bansal, Bhupen Shah, Raghuveer Tarra, Ullas Kamath amongst others.
Manish Singhal, co-founder and Managing Partner at pi Ventures stated, “We are very excited to launch our second fund and continue our mission to back startups which are creating global solutions from India. With AI and other technologies steadily maturing, we can expect some interesting applications in the coming days. With this fund, we aim to support talented entrepreneurs who are creating disruptive products that are solving big fundamental problems, with unique solutions on the back of technology innovations. So far our investment strategy has worked extremely well and we have a healthy portfolio of companies that have scaled massively despite the current pandemic situation. Over the last two years, we have built a strong team that has delivered outstanding performance thereby strengthening our vision of helping make India a ‘DeepTech’ nation.”
With the pandemic giving large acceleration to AI adoption, AI is shifting gears and can disrupt present enterprise fashions. pi Ventures’s newest fund goals to proceed to again such disruptive tech ventures which can be got down to create 10x differentiated companies, the agency stated.
