Kae Capital, an early-stage venture capital (VC) firm in India, has made the final close of its third fund at Rs 767 crore ($94 million), per an announcement.
Some of the international institutional investors who have backed this fund are Old Mutual Wealth, Velo Partners, and Finext, while the Indian ones are HDFC Holdings and SIDBI.
The fund has also seen the participation of entrepreneurs such as Rajesh Yabaji (Blackbuck), Ashish Hemrajani (BookMyShow), Nitish Mittersain (Nazara), Srikanth Velamakanni (Fractal Analytics), Deep Kalra (MakeMyTrip), and Jitendra Gupta (Jupiter), among others.
Additionally, the family offices of Kris Gopalakrishnan (Pratithi), Shashi Kiran Shetty (All Cargo), Sunil Kant Munjal (Hero Enterprise), SRF Family Office, Hemendra Kothari (DSP), Taparia Family Office, and Shashank Singh (Apax) have also pumped in capital.
“The Indian startup ecosystem has grown exponentially since we started Kae Capital 10 years ago. Having been around for so long, we have understood how tough it is to build great companies,” Sasha Mirchandani, founder and managing partner of Kae Capital said in a statement.
Founded in 2012, Kae Capital a sector-agnostic VC that invests in pre-seed to pre-series A stages of a company’s lifecycle. Its typical cheque sizes range from $1-3 million.
Kae has been the first institutional investor in many companies such as Tata 1MG, Zetwerk, Porter, Healthkart, Wysa, and Fynd, among others. So far, it has invested in 79 startups, with a portfolio enterprise valuation of $8.52 billion. It has made 14 exits.
Going forward, Kae is targeting to invest in 25 companies through the latest fund and is planning to tap sectors such as B2B, commerce, consumer tech, SaaS, fintech, and D2C.
Despite global economic uncertainty and slowdown in dealmaking, the VC sector has seen significant activity in terms of fundraising. In the early-stage space alone, firms such as Pi Ventures, Axilor Ventures, and Athera Venture Partners made headlines for launching their funds. They are now understood to be working towards the final close.