Mid-stage-focused venture capital firm Iron Pillar on Wednesday said it has made its debut bet from its second fund on CoreStack, a cloud governance and compliance software-as-a-software (SaaS) startup.
Iron Pillar said in a statement that it has invested $4 million (Rs 29.4 crore) in CoreStack, which is based in Seattle with a development centre in Chennai.
The venture capital firm will formally launch its second fund next year, it added without revealing details. Venture capital and private equity firms typically start making bets after marking the first close of their funds.
Iron Pillar had topped up its debut fund with $45 million in May to help portfolio firms tide over the coronavirus crisis.
With the top-up, Iron Pillar had added three global institutions to its base of Limited Partners, or investors. These include alternative assets investor 57 Stars LLC and a large European family office, the VC firm said, without elaborating.
Iron Pillar, one of the few mid-stage technology investors in India, had marked the final close of its debut fund at $90 million in October 2018.
CoreStack investment
The startup was founded in 2016 by Ezhilarasan Natarajan, Sabapathy Arumugam, Krishnakumar Narayanan and Thiruvalluvar NB. It has enterprise clients in the US, Europe, and India across various sectors such as financial services, healthcare and education.
The startup was created with the aim of addressing governance challenges arising from large-scale cloud adoption by companies.
In March, CoreStack had pulled in $8.5 million (Rs 63.2 crore) in its Series A round of funding led by Dallas Venture Capital (formerly Naya Ventures).
The company said it has grown over 200% per year over the past three years, adding marquee clients across the US, Europe and India.
Mohanjit Jolly, partner at Iron Pillar, said that it is rare in the SaaS world to see a company get the sort of traction that CoreStack has, and that too with relatively little capital.
Iron Pillar said its investment in CoreStack underlines its focus on SaaS enterprises building products from India for global markets.
Its SaaS portfolio includes Now Floats, which was acquired by Reliance Jio in December last year, conversational AI firm Uniphore and device lifecycle management and solutions company Servify.