Taxmantra Launches $100 Mn Fund To Invest In India, Southeast Asian Tech Startups

Global tax and legal firm Taxmantra Global is looking to invest $100 Mn into technology-enabled startups in India and Southeast Asia in the next 18 months, through its latest standalone investment arm called ProfitBoard Ventures. The venture was created to bring Taxmantra’s startup funding, deal structuring and merger and acquisition activities to core focus.

Headquartered in Singapore, ProfitBoard Ventures is a curated growth-stage investment banking firm launched on Tuesday (October 20). It will assist early and growth-stage startups in fundraising through its consortium of global investors. ProfitBoard Ventures has already onboarded a consortium of global investors.

Alok Patnia, the managing partner of ProfitBoard Ventures, said, “Inadequate capital is the number one roadboack on the path to scale from idea stage, this is where ProfitBoard Ventures will offer quality capital and much required hand-holding to early and growth-stage founders. Our medium-term 3-year goal is to nurture 100+ startups from India and Southeast Asia.”

Any startup approaching ProfitBoard Ventures would be required to share their business plans. The plans would be reviewed by the fund’s global advisory board and the selected startups will get a chance to pitch their businesses to the ProfitBoard Consortium of global investors in a Virtual Hot Pitch.

Founded in 1983 by Patnia, Taxmantra Global (TMG) provides advisory, tax and regulatory services to global businesses and has global delivery centres in Singapore, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Delhi.

The company, in the last three years, has assisted in 100+ deals translating into a $180 Mn funding in its existing portfolio of startups. With the launch of ProfitBoard Ventures, Taxmantra will be taking a more direct role in the investment ecosystem.

It believes that the post-Covid-19 scenario looks bright for the Indian technology startups as the investment is expected to reach pre-Covid levels by the end of 2020. Taxmantra also believes that the media ticket size for seed and early-stage startups are expected to increase. “With the shift towards digitiszation and remote working, deep tech,edtech, health-tech, AI/ML startups would definitely have an edge,” the company added.

According to a Inc42 Plus report, ‘The State Of Indian Startup Ecosystem Report 2020’ more than 55,000 startups were launched in India in the last five and half years alone, out of which over 3,200 startups raised $63 Bn in funding. The digital boom and technology disruption, especially in the current times, has led to the increased interest of investors, particularly in the tech-domain.

In a bid to tap into this, even Australia-based software firm Atlassian Corporation has launched a new $50 Mn global fund Atlassian Ventures to invest in cloud-based startups that are building products in the overall Atlassian ecosystem. The company said that it is keen to nurture India’s vibrant startup ecosystem and rich technical talent pool.