Early stage venture fund Pi Ventures has raised $29 Mn (INR 195 Cr) to launch its first fund. Both domestic and international investors have been approached to participate in the fund.
It plans to focus on startups at the idea stage or product-market fit stage. The fund will back 20 product & technology companies in the areas of Connected Hardware, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, IoT, and Mobile.
The fund was launched earlier this year by Manish Singhal and Umakant Soni.
Manish believes that there lies loads of data around with businesses having the computational power to churn it. Also, there is talent available in this field along with interested businesses to adopt these new solutions to grow their businesses and run them more efficiently. “All these factors have ensured the emergence of a large number of startups in these fields,” he added.
The fund is in the process of setting up and is expected to be operational in a couple of months. In their personal capacity, the co-founders have till date invested in startups such as Locus, Opinio, Adpushup, Witworks, GoCoop, FlipClass, BetterButter and Apartment Adda.
Other institutional investors and entrepreneurs associated with the fund are seed stage angel investor Bhupen Shah, chief product officer at GigSky Inc Raghu Tarra, Founder & Executive Vice Chairman of Info Edge Sanjeev Bhikhchandani, co-founder of SlideShare Amit Ranjan and more.
Manish was earlier part of LetsVenture while Umakant was associated with Science Inc., a US-based startup studio, as its India director and has also founded an AI startup, Vimagino in 2009-10.
Other startup funds launched recently include an announcement by Ratan Tata to set up a VC fund, $31 Mn fund raised by Saama Capital and $150 Mn raised by IDG ventures for their third fund and more.
The development was first reported by LiveMint.
