Tanglin Venture Partners, a venture capital fund floated by former Tiger Global executives Ravi Venkatesh and Edwina Yeo, has attracted a clutch of high-profile domestic entrepreneurs as key investors.
The fund is targeting a total corpus of $50 million (Rs 350 crore) to invest in early-stage technology startups in India and Southeast Asia, Venkatesh told The Economic Times. It has already raised a significant amount from 15 limited partners, including individuals and institutions. The average ticket size of the fund is likely to be $3 million initially.
Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal, Flipkart Group CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy and Sujeet Kumar, co-founder of business-to-business marketplace Udaan, are among the investors in Tanglin, the report said, citing people familiar with the development. The Singapore-based VC fund has also received investment from Dan Neary, Asia-Pacific vice president at Facebook.
Tanglin was founded in October 2018, according to the LinkedIn profiles of the co-founders.
The launch of the fund is good news for startups in India where the number of early-stage deals has continued to slide after the boom years of 2015. The total number of venture capital deals—including seed-stage funding transactions by VC firms and angel investments—fell by a fourth to 781 in 2018 from 1,049 in 2017, according to VCCEdge, the data research platform of News Corp VCCircle.
In another fundraising milestone for a VC fund recently, 3one4 Capital last week announced the first close of its dedicated opportunities fund that will seek to invest in select portfolio firms that are raising funding from the Series B stage onwards.
Entrepreneurs backing VC funds
The trend of entrepreneurs and industry leaders investing in VC firms has been gaining ground in India. Binny Bansal, who resigned from Flipkart after a personal misconduct probe last year, has invested in venture capital firms such as Blume Ventures, India Quotient, Stellaris and Pi Ventures.
He also invested in venture capital fund 021 Capital, launched by Sailesh Tulshan, the personal investment adviser to him and Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal.
Other high-profile entrepreneurs who have backed VC funds include MakeMyTrip’s Deep Kalra and Naukri.com’s Sanjeev Bikhchandani.