The investment firm in a statement on Thursday announced the launch of its third fund with a corpus of Rs 2,200 crore, of which Rs 400 crore is under a green shoe option, co-founder Nandan Nilekani.
Through the Fund III, it will deploy Rs 100 crore to Rs 150 crore in startups in the consumer technology, fintech and AI-native and AI-enabled segments. Nilekani, who has invested as anchor LP, has made his largest investment in any VC firm to date, the firm statement said.
Nilekani and Sanjeev Aggarwal launched Fundamentum in 2017. Since then, the firm has invested in 17 companies in its Fund I (2017) and Fund II (2022) through technology-led businesses in consumer internet, Bharat apps, fintech, B2B commerce, enterprise technology and other emerging areas.
The fund comes at an important juncture for the Indian startup ecosystem, which is going through a transformative stage defined by technology, formalisation, growing domestic demand and a nascent digital public infrastructure that only existed a decade ago, Nilekani said. He also said that Indian startups will grow at an unprecedented rate over the coming decade and Fundamentum is well placed to assist them in scaling up.
The fund will support consumer technology models in digital commerce, content, healthcare, edtech and other new areas, the statement said. In the fintech sector, Fundamentum’s interest will be on credit, savings, wealth management, insurance, and financial infrastructure.
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AI will be the third investment pillar for the fund. As these new generation of AI and AI-powered businesses scale, they will require growth capital, the firm noted. In addition, the statement says that Fundamentum will be assessing AI-native and AI-enabled companies as investment themes, as well as how they are changing industries like financial services and consumer technology.
Aggarwal, Prateek Jain and Mayank Kachhwaha will lead fund III along with the CFO of the fund, Sanjay Chaturvedi.
