Verlinvest Joins Spring Marketing Capital’s First Fund As Anchor Investor

Verlinvest Joins Spring Marketing Capital’s Inaugural Fund As Anchor Investor

SUMMARY

Spring Marketing Capital primarily focusses on marketing and branding support for startups

It will partner with VCs to invest between $1 Mn and $2 Mn in select companies

Founded in 2019, Spring Marketing has clients such as Byju’s, Cars24, Cred, among others

Mumbai-based marketing capital firm Spring Marketing Capital has onboarded Belgian investment holding company Verlinvest as an anchor investor in its inaugural fund.

Spring Marketing Capital works in branding and marketing, builds strategies for disruptive startups and consumer brands. It will also invest in early-stage, consumer-facing startups.

The firm helps startups in their marketing journey and also has an investment arm. Spring works with the likes of Byju’s, Cars24, Cred, Wakefit, 1mg, Epigamia among others. It will now reportedly partner with venture capital firms to invest between $1 Mn and $2 Mn and follow up with investments up to $3 Mn in select startups.

“We back entrepreneurs who are creating a new consumer revolution by using brand as their main tool,” Arjun Anand, principal at Verlinvest told ET.

Verlinvest is the investment holding company founded by beverage giant Anheuser-Busch founders and has Byju’s, Veeba, Epigamia and Future Retail in its portfolio. It has invested in funds operated by Everstone Capital and DSG Consumer Partners.

“We typically look for authentic and passionate brand stories, and highly entrepreneurial partners to work with. We saw a huge like-mindedness between what Verlinvest does, and what Spring Capital is doing with their maiden fund,” Anand added.

Spring Marketing Capital was launched in 2019 by former Sequoia India CMO Raja Ganapathy, former DDB Mudra group CEO Vineet Gupta, and former chairman Lowe Lintas Arun Iyer. its Category-II fund reportedly has a target corpus of $30 Mn and has Abhay Pandey, general partner at consumer-focused VC A91 Partners and Amrish Rau, former PayU India CEO, as limited partners.

“The core proposition of the firm is to partner with founders to build the brands of tomorrow,” Ganapathy, founding partner, Spring Capital, told ET.

He added that the fund allows the company to work with startups with a ‘skin in the game’ philosophy and have a seat at the table. “Our ability to influence the trajectory of the brand positively goes up. It allows us to have that much more impact and longer-term alignment with the founder,” he said.