Early-stage-focused venture capital firm Pentathlon Ventures said Tuesday it has started raising its second fund with a target corpus of Rs 450 crore (around $54.4 million).
The Pune-based venture capital firm, which primarily invests in business-to-business (B2B) software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, is looking to deploy the corpus across 25 early-stage startups.
Pentathlon Ventures said it is raising capital from a mix of domestic and global limited partners, including business leaders, corporate houses and institutions. It will invest in pre-seed to Series A deals.
It will make investments across enterprise digital transformation, e-commerce enablement, fintech, vertical SaaS, applied AI, sustainable tech, and healthtech, in the B2B SaaS space.
“The revenues coming from India-based B2B startups are expected to grow 25X in the next eight years. With an impressive 50% faster time to revenue, better revenue predictability, and solid gross margins ranging between 70-80%, it presents extraordinary prospects of building sustainable businesses,” said Pentathlon managing partner Sandeep Chawda.
Founded in 2020, Pentathlon Ventures raised $10 million for its maiden fund and invested it in 23 startups. Its portfolio companies include ShopSe, Riskovry, Fable Fintech, SaleAssist, Rezolve, Doqfy, QuickReply, and SellerGeni.
Pentathlon’s board includes Gireendra Kasmalkar of Ideas to Impacts; Sandeep Chawda, former MD of Globant India; Madhukar Bhatia and Hemant Joshi, co-founders of Sapience Analytics; Shashank Deshpande of Clarice Technologies; and Saurabh Lahoti, who has been part of three early-stage funds.
It also runs GTMDialogues programme, which aims to build a community of SaaS founders and go-to-market leaders to provide mentorship on entrepreneurial aspects, including go-to-market strategies, product distribution, and user acquisition.
“A couple of decades back, India was known for offshore IT services. Later, B2C startups gained prominence because of India’s population/consumption story. Today, Indian B2B startups are on their way to become global leaders within this decade. Add to this the tailwinds from the global focus moving to India,” said managing partner Gireendra Kasmalkar.
