Prime Ventures Plans Six Investments For 2020 Through Third Fund

Early-stage venture capital firm Prime Ventures Partners has planned to invest in six companies in 2020. Moreover, Prime Ventures also plans to make some follow-on investments in some of its companies from its existing portfolio of 25 startups.

The investments will be made through Prime Venture Partners’ third fund of $72 Mn and will focus on six sectors — fintech, software-as-a-service (SaaS), healthcare, consumer, logistics and business-to-business (B2B) startups.

Prime Ventures portfolio currently includes lending platform MoneyTap, invoice discounting platform KredX, expense management software Happay, logistics and supply chain startup WheelsEye, digital transactions tracker Recko and neobanking company NiYO, among others. So far, the company has used 60% of its Fund III to invest in 10 startups.

The VC’s third fund was raised in 2018. Originally, Prime Ventures’ Fund III was expected to have a corpus of $60 Mn, but the company managed to raise additional funds before the final close. The aim of the fund is to add up to five companies to the portfolio, Sanjay Swamy, managing partner at Prime Ventures said.

Started in 2012 by Swami, Shripati Acharya and Amit Somani, Prime Venture focusses on early-stage investments in fintech, SaaS, healthcare, consumer, logistics and B2B. Swamy claims that almost 45% of Prime’s portfolio is comprised of financial services and fintech startups. Some companies in its portfolio also include international companies that don’t have operations in India.

“We have also built a very strong thesis on SaaS as well, both domestic and international. We also have companies like Sunstone Eduversity, AffordPlan and Quizizz which are in healthcare, education and logistics,” Swamy said.

He added, “From the very early days, we had a belief that India is getting digitised, and that more and more aspects of life and business are going to get digitised, and that this will create a lot of data which potentially leads to business opportunities in multiple spaces.”

Besides seed funding, Prime Ventures also focuses on mentoring through strategic partnerships with VCs. The company started its journey with $8 Mn fund in 2012 and a $45 Mn fund in 2015.

Prime Ventures’ average ticket size for Fund III is somewhere between $700K (INR 5 Cr) and INR 12 Cr ($1.6 Mn) for seed investment. The ticket size increases in follow-up rounds, depending on the scalability of the business and its performance.

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