Venture capital firm, Parampara Capital and Management Consultants LLP has launched Parampara Early Stage Opportunities Fund, a Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) registered Category I Alternate Investment Fund with a corpus of $15 Mn. The fund will be operating out of Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bangalore.
The fund will be managed by Venkat Vallabhaneni, a serial entrepreneur; Jatin Desai, former Chief Information Officer of Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Sridhar Rampalli, Founder Partner of boutique investment advisory firm Blue Ocean Multi Client Family Office.
It will invest in early and growth stage startups that are leveraging technology and innovation in sectors such as consumer, financial, healthcare, industrial and other. The fund has kept the investment amount to be between $450K to $1.5 Mn (INR 3 Cr. to INR 10 Cr.) which it will invest in each startup.
The company is currently planning to invest in one startup at a time and are in active discussions with six startups across sectors like engineering automation, media & entertainment and consumer / retail technology for investments.
The fund’s core investment team is supported by an investment committee which consists of entrepreneurs and business leaders, who will play a key role in investment decisions of the fund. The trio of General Partners are assisted by two investment managers, Sunayana Gutta and Murali Gunturu.
It will also have an advisory committee consisting of pre-eminent names in their respective areas of expertise who will provide their diverse experience in form of an advisors to the fund as well as its portfolio companies.
Jatin Desai, former CIO of Bank of America ML said, “An integral part of our investment process is the operational and strategic support which we provide to our portfolio companies in areas like strategy execution, organizational development and scaling.”
Besides fundraising, portfolio companies will be given benefits like:
- Periodic review on operational and strategic issue – an earmarked team of Parampara will focus on these aspects exclusively.
- With the help of its pool / network of functional experts, they will assist the startups in setting up or evaluating their operational procedures
- Investors / Advisors with relevant experience will work actively with the startups on strategic issues taking up advisory roles
- It will also facilitate the startups in improving their visibility and support them in future fundraising activities
Few investments made by its General Partners in their individual capacity include, VioletStreet (online fashion portal), eVaidya (tech driven healthcare startup), Zify (app-based carpooling platform) and Aries BioMed (biomedical engineering company).
