Chiratae Ventures, one of the top home-grown venture capital firms in the country, has launched the latest edition of its seed-stage initiative, Innovators Programme, as the technology-focused investor prepares to double down on its early-stage investment activities.
This is the seventh edition of the Innovators Programme, which kicked off about five years ago.
Chiratae, which counts companies such as Myntra, Curefit, FirstCry and Lenskart in its portfolio, has made over 50 early-stage investments till date, splashing out $125 million.
“The focus is to look at companies within our core sectors – consumer technology, healthcare and health-tech, fintech, enterprise software and deep-tech,” Karan Mohla, executive director and partner at Chiratae Ventures told ET in an exclusive interview.
“Post Covid-19, there are a lot of opportunities that have been thrown up, alongside challenges as well. Part of the problem we want to solve is, access to capital. But for us it goes a little bit deeper and broader. We also want to solve the real world challenges an entrepreneur faces,” Mohla added.
The Innovators Programme is a theme-based, five-week initiative that will kick off early November and continue till mid-December. The programme will see Chiratae write cheques of between $500,000 and $3 million for the 10-20 startups that have been accepted into the programme.
The Innovators Programme is one of the earliest seed-stage initiatives undertaken by a major venture capital firm in India. However, over the past 2-3 years, almost every one of India’s VC investors have launched their own iteration of seed-stage incubation or acceleration programmes, including Sequoia Capital, Orios Venture Partners, Kalaari Capital and Waterfield Advisors, among others, as they look to identify potentially substantial bets at cheaper valuations and earn multi-bagger exits.
Chiratae’s focus is on backing very early-stage ventures across sectors, but which are underpinned by technology and have a strong focus on intellectual property, and helping them scale, identify go-to-market strategies, and hire key personnel, while also assisting them in raising further capital.
It also gives the firm an opportunity to explore newer emerging stores, such as deep-tech and agri-tech
Till date, Chiratae has invited in about 14 companies through the Innovator Programme, including education toys startup PlayShifu, robotics venture Emotix, software company Deepfence, which have all scaled and raised mid-to-growth-stage capital since Chiratae first invested. The idea is to identify and back companies that have the potential to establish a global footprint, according to Mohla.
“We are the longest running programme in the country right now. It’s important to note that we do not believe in the concept of ‘spray and pray’… Many of the companies are market leaders today in their respective segments. We have also already exited some of them. In the seed programme, the differentiation is, at last count, our companies have filed 111 patents,” Sudhir Sethi, founder and chairman of Chiratae Ventures, said.
According to Sethi, all of Chiratae’s seed-stage companies now command a cumulative valuation of over $1 billion.
This also comes at a time when the firm is raising its latest fund – a $275 million fund – and is targeting to raise at least 50% of the target corpus from domestic investors and family offices and institutions. This would make it the largest rupee capital fund raised by a home-grown VC firm.
“We have actually had more in the pipeline in terms of commitments, post Covid-19. It mattered that we are an Indian fund… we are Indian capital, it also mattered that Jio raised such a large amount of money, because investors who were sitting on the fence thought this was an interesting opportunity, and that sort of helped us,” Sethi said.
No comments: