Singapore-headquartered investment firm Lighthouse Canton said Wednesday it has made the final close of LC Nueva AIF, a scheme of Luminere Investment Trust, at Rs 350 crore ($42 million).
The firm was earlier planning to raise Rs 300 crore, including a Rs 100 crore greenshoe option, but said it decided to upsize the fund in the wake of excess demand by family offices and institutional investors.
Lighthouse said that the LC Nueva AIF drew interest from investors from various categories including large single-family offices and institutional limited partner like SIDBI (Small Industries Development Bank of India).
SIDBI, which manages a Rs 10,000 crore fund-of-funds for startups and has backed VC firms like Blume Ventures, Chiratae Ventures and Omnivore among others, committed Rs 50 crore to Lighthouse Canton’s venture capital fund.
Lighthouse Canton had partnered with Nueva Capital to launch the fund. The fund focuses on early-stage companies and typically invests in startups in their pre-Series A/Series A stage of funding. It said that it invests in startups with strong unit economics that have typically started generating revenue.
The fund has a sector-agnostic approach but prefers to invest in healthtech, consumer-tech, fintech and edtech businesses. The fund has a portfolio of around 30-35 companies and has committed nearly 85% of the total corpus.
Some of its notable portfolio companies include internship platform Internshala, fintech startup Financepeer, healthtech startup Redcliffe Lifetech, and digital lender Revfin, amongst others.
“The fund has plans to deploy about half of the corpus in building the portfolio while the other half would be utilised for the follow-on rounds for these companies,” said Sohil Chand, founding partner and chief investment officer of LC Nueva.
“The objective of this deployment strategy is to maximize alpfa for our LPs and the most efficient possible use of capital raised. It also helps us maintain our equity share in subsequent rounds of capital raised by our portfolio companies and not get diluted,” he said.
