Athera Venture Partners Nets Funding From HDFC AMC For Its Fourth Fund

Early stage investor Athera Venture Partners has secured funding from HDFC AMC’s Select AIF FoF I Scheme for its fourth fund.

For its fourth fund, which was launched with a target corpus of INR 900 Cr ($120 Mn) in May 2022, Athera is targeting a close next year.

The investment of HDFC FoF will be targetting fast growing tech startups operating in the consumer internet, enterprise software, AI and other emerging technologies.

“With this fund we remain committed to support the Indian startup ecosystem and are looking forward to backing many exciting and innovative founders that are set to transform the world with their solutions,” said Rutvik Doshi, general partner and managing director of Athera.

Founded in 2006 as Inventus Capital Partners (now Athera Venture Partners), it is a cross-border firm investing in early stage and tech-first startups from US and India. The fund has so far invested in more than 60 companies, 13 of which are from its third fund. 

The VC firm closed its INR 369 Cr third fund in 2019.

Through its fourth fund, the early stage investor has funded companies including PlayShifu, maker of augmented reality-driven toys and games, logistics SaaS startup ClickPost, Bengaluru-based robotics startup CynLr and Koo founder Mayank Bidawatka’s Billion Hearts, this year.

Additionally, the investment firm has also funded autonomous robotics company Ati Motors and Hyperbots, AI finance automation startup.

Athera will continue to invest in a dozen more such startups from its Fund IV, the investor said in a statement, in the next 18-24 months.

This development comes at a time when investment companies have gone full swing to back the growing startups of the country.

For instance, Micro venture capital firm Warmup Ventures floated its second fund, with a target corpus of INR 300 Cr (around $35.3 Mn), earlier this week.

Meanwhile, fintech unicorn Zerodha launched a new fund named FLOSS/fund in October, to support Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects globally, by providing an annual funding of $1 Mn.

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