Bangalore-based seed stage capital firm AngelPrime has raised Rs 300 crore ($46.82 million) for its second VC fund mostly from institutional investors from Silicon Valley, New York, Hong Kong, Europe and Singapore and a few high net-worth individuals, it said on Thursday.
Its institutional investors in the new fund include Palo Alto-based venture capital firm Social+Capital Partnership, which had also backed its debut fund. Besides Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social+Capital Partnership, Mayfield and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang were the investors in the firm’s first fund.
In a parallel development, AngelPrime has changed its name to ‘Prime Venture Partners’.
The new fund will allow the VC firm to sign cheques worth up to $1 million in seed rounds and reserve capital to participate in subsequent rounds, according to Sanjay Swamy, co-founder and managing partner, Prime Venture Partners.
Swamy said the firm will invest in three to five companies every year: “We aim to invest the new fund in three years and the life of the fund will be 10 years.â€
Prime Venture Partners targets to deploy around Rs 60 crore or a fifth of its corpus in the first year itself.
Founded in 2011 by Swamy along with Sripati Acharya and Bala Parthasarathy, it has fully invested its maiden fund of Rs 50 crore over the past four years.
The firm had built a portfolio of around a dozen companies including Ezetap, Smart Owner, Synup, HackerEarth, happay and Vidgyor and ZipDial (which was acquired by Twitter). At least one of its portfolio firms, Unamia, an e-commerce venture dealing with kids apparel, shut down.
Meanwhile, one of the co-founding partners, Parthasarathy, has resigned from the firm while Amit Somani, former product head of MakeMyTrip has joined as managing partner. Also, Silicon Valley-based tech entrepreneur and investor Rajesh Mashruwala, who served as a board member and Limited Partner (or investor) in its previous fund, has taken up the role of partner emeritus of Prime Venture Partners, and is involved in investment decisions and startup mentoring.
“Our focus is still at seed stage. We will work with entrepreneurs anywhere from paper napkin (ideation) to early revenue stage,†said Acharya, who is also co-founder and managing partner.
“Fintech, financial services, consumer internet, IoT, Aadhaar and healthcare sectors are our focus areas,†said Amit Somani, the new managing partner of the VC firm.
