Campus Fund Launches $100 Mn Third Fund To Back Student-Led Startups

SUMMARY

The investment vehicle has marked its first close with more than 50% of the capital already committed

Campus Fund plans to back up to 60 startups via fund III over the next four years

The initial cheque size will range from INR 1-8 Cr, with half the fund reserved for the follow-on investments

Campus Fund, a venture capital firm focused on student-led startups, has launched its third and largest fund till date with a target corpus of $100 Mn.

The investment vehicle has marked its first close with more than 50% of the capital already committed and has started deploying the proceeds with two investments already made.

Campus Fund plans to back up to 60 startups via fund III over the next four years. The initial cheque size will range from INR 1-8 Cr, with half the fund reserved for the follow-on investments.

The fund is backed by family offices, entrepreneurs, industrialists, and financial institutions such as 360 One (formerly IIFL Wealth). Among the limited partners (LPs) include Kanwaljit Singh (founder, Fireside Ventures), Bharat Shah (cofounder, HDFC Bank), Jaimin Bhatt (former CFO, Kotak Mahindra Bank), Asha Jadeja Motwani (early investor in Google) and Sameen Farooqui (Global Head of FX, Deutsche Bank).

Founded in 2020 by serial entrepreneur Richa Bajpai, Campus Fund is registered as a SEBI Category II AIF and invests in founders who are in university, have dropped out or graduated within the past three years.

Prior to launching Campus Fund, Bajpai cofounded Goodera, a global technology platform that specialises in corporate volunteering and social impact management. It is backed by Nexus Venture Partners, Omidyar Network, Elevation Capital and Flipkart cofounder Binny Bansal.

The VC firm counts Expand My Business (digital services marketplace), Digantara (space tech), EtherealX (reusable rockets), Sama (online dispute resolution), D-Nome (decentralised genomics infra), Sarla (flying taxis) and GreenGrahi (insect protein), among its portfolio companies.

Of these, many of them have raised follow-on capital from investors like Peak XV Partners, Accel, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), AlphaWave and DST Global.

In July 2020, Campus Fund launched its first fund of INR 7 Cr, investing in 10 Indian startups like LegalTech, ParkSmar, HealthySure and Expand My Business. The second fund of $10 Mn followed in 2022.