India: Early-stage accelerator 9Unicorns rebrands, launches second fund

9Unicorns, an early-stage accelerator in India, has launched its second investment vehicle, following a rebranding exercise.

The firm, now renamed as 100Unicorns, is targeting to raise $200 million, including a green-shoe option of $100 million.

The launch of 100Unicorns Fund II highlights the firm’s commitment to nurture the next wave of 200 challenger startups emerging out of India, it said in a statement.

100Unicorns is a part of India’s largest multistage investing firm Venture Catalysts.

Its first fund, 100Unicorns Fund I (formerly 9Unicorns) that was launched in 2020 with a corpus of $100 million, has invested in a gamut of startups such as Videoverse, Trunativ, ZyppElectric, Renee Cosmetics, and IGP, among others.

“We have seen significant growth in the Indian startup ecosystem and massive funding inflow in the past couple of years,” said Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, Managing Director of Venture Catalysts Group and co-founder of 100Unicorns, in a media statement.

“India was regarded as an IT outsourcing nation for the 3-4 decades, but in the last 10 years, India has emerged as a global leader across large multi-billion-dollar companies,” he added.

Going forward, 100Unicorns plans to back a pool of 200 startups and provide funding in the range of $300,000-1 million in each of them. This could be followed by another round of funding worth $500,000 to $2 million in subsequent rounds, it said in a statement.

The rebranding exercise has been adopted by the firm at a time when the Indian economy has recorded a 15-fold jump in startup funding between 2015 and 2022.

India is currently the third-largest startup ecosystem in the world with over 110,000 emerging companies, according to data from the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade & Tracxn. The country is now home to 111 unicorns with a valuation of $350 billion.

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