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Early-stage VC firm Unicorn India Ventures (UIV) on Tuesday announced the first close of its Rs 1,000 crore Fund III. The first close is at Rs 225 crore and final close is expected by March next year.

With the Fund III, UIV aims to build a portfolio of 25 startups that are focused in the global software-as-a-service (SaaS) and digital platforms. 

From the sector's perspective, the VC company is looking at newer sectors of climate tech, agritech, spacetech and the semiconductor ecosystem.

"Being the first institutional investors, before doing any investment, we spend considerable time with the founders to understand their vision, team’s capabilities, growth plans and leadership style,” said Bhaskar Majumdar, Managing Partner, Unicorn India Ventures.

“Our focus is to invest in companies that are enablers of India’s digitisation across sectors. We avoid high cash burn businesses like D2C, consumer internet, content businesses,” he added.

Started in 2016 by Majumdar and Anil Joshi, after the success of its first fund, Unicorn India Ventures launched Fund II, a Rs 300 crore fund, in 2020 and has seen exceptional growth, with several of the portfolios raising multiple rounds in the first two years after the initial investment. 

The second Fund has a portfolio of 20 companies. Unicorn India Ventures now has two funds under management and an active portfolio of over 35 companies.

The Fund 1 with a corpus of Rs 100 crore invested in companies like SmartCoin, Open Bank, Sequretek, Pharmarack, Genrobotics, Clootrack and FutureCure. 

The Fund II invested in 20 companies like Gamerji, ForeignAdmits, Probus, Daalchini, Esmito and Finin. 

The Fund III now looks at investing a first cheque of around $1-2 million and then invest in the follow-on round. 

“Over 60 per cent of our portfolio is built from startups coming from emerging regional hubs like Kochi, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Pune and Hyderabad, among others,” said Joshi, Managing Partner.

“With this third fund, our commitment to nurture Indian startups will be unwavering and we will keep scouting for highly innovative companies whose disruptive solutions can address real life problems of users by leveraging technology,” he added.

The company said it has also appointed two key senior personnel, Bikram Mahajan and Kamlesh Ahuja, to strengthen the management team.