Bengaluru-based micro-venture capital firm gradCapital on Friday said it has launched its second fund of $6 million (Rs 49.6 crore) to back student-run startups.
gradCapital, which is targetting to invest in 20 startups in a year, said in a statement that it will write a cheque of $40,000 each for a 4% stake in startups.
The announcement comes two years after the firm had launched its maiden VC fund which had a total corpus of $1 million and the average investment cheque was $25,000.
Founded in 2021 by Abhishek Sethi and Prateek Behera, gradCapital is a student-focused micro-venture capital firm that is backed by CIIE, Alagu Periyannan (BlueJeans), Ankur Warikoo and Kanwal Rekhi (Inventus Capital).
It also has launched a grant program called atomic fellowship in which it intends to provide $5,000 as grants to students with technical projects that have the potential of becoming companies. It is supported by Emergent Ventures.
“We are not in the business of finding and investing in deals, we are in the business of letting students be ambitious and build a future. It’s a systemic failure when ambitious students aren’t able to take off while in college, and they end up taking a job because of financial obligations” said Sethi.
In the micro-VC space, Capfort Ventures launched its micro-VC fund in July after receiving approval from the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI).
According to Bain & Company's India Venture Capital 2023 report, which used data from VCCEdge, the research platform of VCCircle. The number of active micro-VCs grew from 65 in 2021 to 80 in 2022, thus signaling a shift in the early-stage investment ecosystem which has been predominantly occupied by angel networks and large VC firms.
