Cornerstone Ventures Floats Second Fund With $200 Mn Corpus

Mumbai-based venture capital (VC) firm Cornerstone Ventures has launched its second fund, with a target corpus of $200 Mn, including a green-shoe option.

The fund’s investment ticket size ranges from $5 Mn to $15 Mn. It follows a multi-stage strategy, primarily focussing on early growth stage startups.

It will focus on B2B tech opportunities across software platforms and marketplaces operating in diverse sectors such as financial services and insurance, retail, consumer goods and ecommerce, distribution and supply chain, healthcare products and services as well as sector agnostic core technology innovations.

The fund aims to create significant value for entrepreneurs which goes beyond capital, including access to a large enterprise customer ecosystem, access to strategic funding from next round investors and a large network of mentors and go-to-market partners, it said in a statement.

Furthermore, through this fund, Cornerstone Ventures, aims to target early growth stage companies with the potential to reshape enterprise businesses and unlock sustainable growth in a rapidly evolving technology landscape.

Abhishek Prasad, managing partner of Cornerstone Ventures, said, “Our second fund builds on the success of Fund-I, and underscores our commitment to supporting emerging B2B Enterprise Tech opportunities. We aim to back some of the largest value creators in this space of ‘Next Generation Enterprise Technologies’, whether building in India for the world or building exclusively for the domestic market.”

“We particularly like innovations that catalyse core business processes, tend to engage multiple stakeholders across the value-chain thus building multiple revenue streams, and have demonstrable account-level profitability” Prasad added.

Founded by former Reliance executives, Rajiv Vaishnav and Abhishek Prasad, Cornerstone Ventures is specialising in early-growth stage investments in B2B enterprise tech companies.

Cornerstone Ventures launched its fund 1 in mid-2019 with a size of approximately $50 Mn. Fund-I is now deployed across 21 portfolio companies, primarily focussed on B2B enterprise SaaS business model. Its portfolio companies include NimbleBox.ai, CreditNirvana, UniAcco, among others.

According to Inc42’s Indian Tech Startup Funding Report 2023, enterprise tech startups witnessed a 68% decline in funding to $1.3 Bn in 2023 from $4 Bn in 2022. The number of deals plummeted over 46% to 157 during the year from 292 in 2022.

Moreover, late-stage enterprise tech startups were the most impacted. The funding raised by these startups plunged 71% year-on-year (YoY) to $602 Mn, while the number of deals declined 50% YoY to 11.