Deepak Shahdadpuri-led early-stage investment firm DSG Consumer Partners has achieved the final close of its second fund at $40 million (Rs 267 crore), a media report said.
The second fund, DSGCP II, aims to make 20 investments, the Mint newspaper reported on Monday, citing Shahdadpuri. It will focus on companies in India and Southeast Asia, and will deploy the entire corpus by mid-2018.
The fund was launched in January 2016 and had hit the first close at $35 million in a little over eight weeks.
However, DSG had earlier told VCCircle that it was targeting a corpus of $50 million for DSGCP II.
The second fund has already made investments in nine companies, including Raw Pressery and Drums Food International.
An email query to DSGCP did not elicit any response till the time of filing of this report.
DSG Consumer had raised its first fund in December 2012 with a corpus of $20 million. It invested in 19 companies, including mobile payments service provider Mswipe Technologies, specialty food ingredients maker Veeba Foods, restaurant reservations and rating platform Eazydiner, personal coaching firm GOQii, frozen dry fruit and vegetable firm Saraf Food, and specialty cheese maker Exito Gourmet.
Picking up pace
The early-stage investment space in India has seen several fund-launching activities in the recent past. Earlier this year, IDFC Alternatives, the private equity arm of IDFC Group, partnered venture capital firm Parampara Capital to launch an early-stage fund targeting innovative startups.
Last September, early stage venture capital firm YourNest had launched its second fund, YourNest India Fund II, with a target of Rs 300 crore.
Earlier that month, the founders of Mumbai-based co-working space provider and startup accelerator Z Nation Lab had said it was planning to launch a seed-stage venture capital fund to back technology firms.
In October, another early-stage investor Ventureast Fund Advisors India Ltd had announced the first close of its sixth fund – Ventureast Procative Fund II (VPF2) – at $83 million en route to a target corpus of $150 million.
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