Early-stage venture capital firm 8X Ventures Wednesday said it has marked the first close of its second VC fund, a year after launching it.
The deeptech-focused fund, which has backed startups like digital auditing firm Oditly and software services company Atmax, has marked the first close at Rs 60 crore, according to its statement.
The fund, which has a target corpus of Rs 200 crore with a greenshoe option of Rs 100 crore, aims to invest in 18-20 early-stage deeptech Indian startups.
In terms of its average cheque size, the fund intends to invest within the range of Rs 2-5 crore as an initial investment and targeting total investments of up to Rs 20 crore each.
"This fund will concentrate on sectors such as water sanitation and hygiene (WASH), Industry 4.0, advanced computing, biotech, and B2B enterprise SaaS," said Chirag Gupta, managing partner, 8X Ventures.
While the second fund would be focus on India, the first fund had also looked at investment opportunities in the Middle East and Singapore. The firm’s limited partners are mostly high net-worth individuals in the Middle East region.
The VC firm has almost fully deployed its first fund. It invested in 14 deeptech companies, robotics startup Solinas, Singapore-based advanced computing services provider Lightspeed Photonics, XYMA Analytics and Zenpulsar, among others.
The firm claims to have achieved an internal rate of return of around 40%, while it also claims to be sitting on a 2.1X multiple on invested capital (MoIC) since deployment in 2022.
The 8X Ventures team comes from a technology background, which gives them experience in both the technology and commercial side of the problems these startups are solving. Its team includes Esha Arya, Ajay Singh Rajput, and Vinod Agarwal.