Arkam Ventures closes maiden fund at $106 M
- ByStartupStory | April 13, 2022
Arkam Ventures, the early stage venture capital firm , floated by co-founder at Helion Ventures, Rahul Chandra, and former partner at Kalaari Capital, Bala Srinivasa, announced the final close of its maiden fund at about $106 million (Rs 790 crore approximately). From its initial target of Rs 650 crore, the fund was oversubscribed, said the fund in a statement.
In 12 companies, including the likes of fintech companies Smallcase, Jai Kisan, KrazyBee, Jar, as well as supply chain companies like patient relationship management platform BestDoc, Jumbotail, and others, the fund has already been invested.
Bala Srinivasa, Partner at Arkam Ventures said that the fund will invest in a total of 18 to 20 companies. He added that they are seeing some pull-back on valuation and they will see some reversion from 2021.
With an average cheque size of Rs 10 crore to Rs 20 crore, Arkam Ventures invests in Series A and Series B companies. In June 2020, the fund had announced its first close.
Limited Partners in the fund include institutional investors including British International Investment Plc, Evolvence Group, Nippon India Digital Innovation, Capria, and SIDBI. Early backers of the fund include Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal, Paytmfounder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Infoedge founder Sanjeev Bikhchandani, and MakeMyTrip co-founder Rajesh Magow.
Digital-first companies across sectors including food and agriculture, education and logistics, financial services, healthcare, as well as SaaS platforms in horizontal digital infrastructure get investment from Arkam. Seven among its 12 portfolio companies have already raised follow-up investments, said the statement.
An uptick year-on-year has been seen in the early-stage funding. According to research, as compared to $1.5 billion for the year 2019, for the first eight months of calendar year 2021, nearly $1.9 billion is being invested in early stage companies alone.
In order to catch promising startups young, multiple venture capital funds have announced early stage programmes. In August 2021, Accel announced its pre-seed programme, Accel Atoms.
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