WaterBridge Ventures Launches $15 Mn Fund For Early Stage Tech Startups

Angel investor and private equity veteran Manish Kheterpal has launched WaterBridge ventures with a fund corpus of $15 Mn (INR 100 crore). It is a SEBI registered, early stage startups fund with initial focus on Seed and Series A funding in the technology startups.

Manish Kheterpal is one of the partners of the fund. He has earlier invested in companies like Edukart, Joe Hukum and MyVR. It is also backed by a number of family offices, high net-worth individuals and companies. However, the details regarding other partners remain undisclosed.

As said, with this fund, the venture capitalists are targeting consumer-focused mobile apps in media and telecom, ed-tech, health-tech and fin-tech startups. The venture fund will primarily look to invest between INR 75 lakh and INR 3.5 crore in 12-15 ventures, and has a fund life cycle of 5-7 years.

The fund made its first close at $5 Mn. In March, it was reported that it is planning to made the second close at $10 Mn.

Lately, investors have shifted their cheques towards startups at early stage, owing to increasing risks and market uncertainties.

“It helps that VCs have tightened the tap for later stages of funding, as those help with entrepreneurs driving sharper business plans in earlier stages, valuations are more realistic and conversations are more sensible,” said Kheterpal.

Other VC funds launched in last 6 months includes $100 Mn leaders fund, and a new fund, IdeaSpring launched by Naganand Doraswamy and Prashant Deshpande, along with Patni Computers’ scions Arihant and Amit Patni.  The existing VC’s which raised funding includes $920 Mn by Sequoia Capital and $30 Mn by Kae Capital.