Micro venture capital firm Arali Ventures, which primarily focuses on enterprise tech in India, has hit the road to launch its second seed fund and is planning to raise around $30-40 million (approximately Rs 229-305 crore) by July, the investment firm’s partner told VCCircle.
VCCircle had in 2018 reported that Arali marked the first close of its debut seed fund with a target corpus of Rs 50 crore (around $7 million). Now, the second fund is a significant pump up from the firm’s maiden fund.
Arali Ventures Managing Partner Rajiv Raghunandan said that the platform had made 12 investments with its debut fund.
He further added that they are now eyeing investment in two or three more companies through the first fund, which is now nearing its later stage of investment cycle.
In the last three-four months, Arali has backed three startups, which includes software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform CogniSaaS; virtual care infrastructure startup HBox and Outvision in the business-to-business (B2B) commerce space for eyewear.
On the second fund, Raghunandan said, "We will be targeting to do full investment rounds on our own in the pre-seed and seed stage, which means we will target higher levels of equity ownership than we had in the first one".
He added that they have been seed-stage investors in business-to-business (B2B) tech.
"We invest in startups that provide services to enterprises, mid-market startups, and SMBs, both in India and in the rest of the world, primarily in the US. We will continue to invest in this sector with a focus on SME Tech, industrial automation and robotics," Raghunandan said.
He also underlined that Arali Ventures had already made its exit from Insent.AI. The B2B enterprise sales platform got acquired by a NASDAQ-listed company called ZoomInfo in 2021.
"If you look at our first fund portfolio, we are one of the few funds who can talk about portfolio annual recurring revenue (ARR) being close to $100 million as a metric. As an early stage fund, I think that is the metric that we're most proud of," said Raghunandan.
"We have no mortality, which means no company has gone down so far," he added.
Arali Ventures is a pre-seed, seed-stage VC from India, investing in entrepreneurs building enterprise-tech solutions. Their initial investment in a startup ranges from $300,000 to $0.5 million.
The firm was set up in January 2018 and its debut fund is registered as a Category-I Alternative Investment Fund with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI). Similarly, their second fund will be registered under the same category.
In 2019, Arali had invested in Norway-based healthcare startup Oivi AS. The firm invested in Decodem Technologies Pvt. Ltd, a robo-research startup that decodes data for insights, in 2020.
Last year, Arali invested an undisclosed amount in Pathfndr.io which is a SaaS for travel agencies. It also backed Chennai-based freight management platform Wiz Freight and supply chain robotics technology company Unbox Robotics in the same year.