Early-stage investing platform Indian Angel Network (IAN) has launched its second fund, IAN Alpha Fund, with a target corpus of about $120 million (Rs 1000 crore), per an announcement on Thursday.
The fund is aligned with IAN’s vision of investing in 500 startup, with Rs 5,000 crore, and creating 500,000 jobs, IAN said in a statement.
IAN Alpha Fund is looking to invest in cleantech and environment, healthtech, agritech, edutech, fintech, and emerging sectors such as industry 4.0, space tech, Web 3, robotics, etc with cheque sizes ranging from $1 million to $5 million, along with co-investors, the statement added.
IAN’s first fund had raised Rs 375 crore in 2019.
“After IAN Fund 1, which has been fully deployed and started to return capital, we wanted to continue building on IAN’s vision of being the single largest platform for early-stage funding. Hence, launching IAN Alpha Fund was the next logical step. This will, in fact, leverage and garner benefits from IAN’s global network, domain experts, and high -quality mentors to help the partners build another high-return potential portfolio,” said Padmaja Ruparel, senior managing partner of IAN Alpha Fund.
“We will be keen on investing in innovative ideas that have the capacity to generate profits and aim to solve real-world problems,” Ruparel added.
IAN claims to have seeded and bred companies which today have a market valuation of $9 billion+ and includes three unicorns and five soonicorns in its portfolio of 200 + companies. With an investment of Rs 900 crore, the IAN platform has catalysed investments of Rs 18,000 crore and created over 80,000 jobs.
“With the IAN Alpha Fund, entrepreneurs can access larger Series A round cheques from IAN. For us, the idea is to support the ventures not only from tier I cities but even from tier 2 & 3 areas that are solving real-world problems at large. We are eyeing startups that are scaling quickly with technology as their core foundation,” said Vinod Keni, Managing Partner, IAN Alpha Fund.
IAN’s investments include conversational automation startup Uniphore, online fashion brand Fab Alley, logistics SaaS startup FarEye, market automation platform WebEngage, quick-service restaurant chain Wow! Momo, data protection and data management platform Druva, cloud kitchen startup Box8, and transportation and automation startup LogiNext.