Reservoir Investment Managers, an early stage venture capital firm floated by IT industry bigwigs including former Infosys execs V Balakrishnan and Mohandas Pai among others, has made its second and final close of its maiden fund Exfinity Technology Fund - Series I (ETF-I) at Rs 125 crore (around $20 million).
The fund had announced its first close at Rs 100 crore in June 2014 and with the green shoe option has garnered Rs 25 crore more to close the fund.
The firm said the fund attracted investors including CXOs, reputed industrialists, family offices, professionals and UHNIs.
Balakrishnan said, “Our proposition of a practitioner-driven fund in funding disruptive technology ideas with high impact strategic interventions has resonated well with the investors. We are excited about the response and have already firmed up a few investments opportunities. The start up space is extremely vibrant and the timing is opportune to invest.”
He added that fund has signed up four transactions that are in advanced stages of closure.
Reservoir is the sponsor of ETF-I, a VC fund registered under SEBI’s AIF Regulations 2012. The fund has a five-year life with an option of two one-year extensions. It has a hurdle rate of 12 per cent with 2:15 management fee to carried interest ratio.
It would focus on products/services/applications targeting global footprint; investments in a mix of B2B and B2C space in early and emerging stage funding; technologies impacting key business processes, present economic, social and business issues - opportunities seen in enterprise space, Big Data and analytics, cloud computing, application development, e-commerce, education, healthcare, etc.
The fund was floated last year and counts marquee IT industry backers. Besides Balakrishnan and Mohandas Pai, it has Girish Paranjpe (former Wipro co-CEO) and Deepak Ghaisas (founder of i-flex). Its advisory committee includes Paranjpe, Ghaisas, Pai and Sushil Mantri (a realtor).
Its management team is led by Shailesh Ghorpade, who had earlier started realty investment firm Azure Capital.
The move by Balakrishnan and Mohandas Pai to invest in Exfinity Fund comes close after both of them have made key investments in Unitus Seed Fund, which backs entrepreneurs who target the bottom-of-the-pyramid (BoP) market.
Mohandas Pai is also raising a sector-agnostic private equity fund along with Ranjan Pai of Manipal Group. Recently, both of them had invested in a technology accelerator fund called the Habit Fund.
(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)
