Venture capital firm IDG Ventures India has tied up with Unilever Ventures and Amazon Internet Services Pvt. Ltd to jointly invest in startups in the consumer technology, software, health-tech and fintech products segments.
The new initiative, christened Innovation Program, will invest between $500,000 and $5 million in startups looking to raise seed or Series A rounds, IDG said in a statement.
Unilever Ventures is the venture capital and private equity arm of consumer goods giant Unilever, which is also an investor in IDG. Amazon Internet is the Indian affiliate of Amazon Web Services Inc., the cloud-computing arm of Seattle-headquartered online retail giant Amazon.com Inc.
As part of the programme, Unilever Ventures will co-invest with IDG while the shortlisted companies will receive technology mentorship from the Amazon Internet team and value-added benefits like Amazon Web Services credits, business support and go-to-market connects.
Sudhir Sethi, founder chairman at IDG Ventures India, said the initiative aims to reach out to about 1,000 companies in the next two months and invest in select startups from its third fund.
IDG Ventures India had marked the final close of its third fund in March, meeting its targeted corpus of $200 million.
Last year, the VC firm had collaborated with Bangalore-based startup accelerator Axilor Ventures to find and fund early-stage startups in frontier tech sectors. The Frontier Tech Innovators Programme scouted for startups not ready for mass-market commercial adoption such as augmented reality, virtual reality, blockchain and bitcoin, artificial intelligence and deep learning.
IDG Ventures India typically invests between $500,000 and $10 million in startups. Its portfolio consists of about 65 companies including Flipkart, Lenskart, Uniphore and Zivame. It invested in nine companies last year including Little Black Book, Flyrobe, Active.ai, Pipecandy, Hansel.io and Infisecure with ticket size varying from $500,000 to $3 million.
IDG Ventures India is part of IDG Ventures, a global network of technology funds with about $7 billion in assets under management. The Indian arm of the fund was founded in 2006 by Sethi, Manik Arora, and TC Meenakshisundaram. Arora quit the firm in 2015.
