Nilekani rolls out 2nd fund with $227 million

BENGALURU: Nandan Nilekani’s venture fund Fundamentum Partnership has launched its second fund with a corpus of $227 million to invest in growth-stage startups that have attained product-market fit and are in a scale-up phase. Fundamentum plans to lead or co-lead funding rounds, and invest $25-40 million each in four-five startups every year.
The second fund, which was oversubscribed, is little over twice the size of its maiden $100-million fund that was launched by Nilekani along with Helion co-founder Sanjeev Aggarwal in 2017. The first fund was deployed across six firms including Spinny and Pharmeasy that have turned unicorns. Canadian pension fund CDPQ invested in the first fund as a limited partner (LP) in 2018.
About 25% of the corpus of the new fund will come from Fundmentum’s core team. Besides Nilekani and Aggarwal, the team comprises co-founder & general partner Ashish Kumar, principal Pratik Jain, and CFO Sanjay Chaturvedi. Nilekani said he is optimistic about India’s digital transformation story.
“We are long-term bullish on Indian startups. India has90,000 startups and more than 100 unicorns, maybe some of them are not unicorns now. We are seeing great entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs’ alumni, we are seeing liquidity events — people are getting exits and there is a maturing of the industry. While there could be a situation in the world, we are very confident that this is the time you get access to great companies,” he said at a press event in Bengaluru on Friday. Nilekani said series-B and series-C funding continue to be underserved. “We have also created an advisory panel to help these companies on strategy, marketing, leadership development…as it goes back to our philosophy of giving not just money, but more,” he said. The fund is looking to invest in consumer, digital, Bharat apps and agri tech. Aggarwal said when the first edition of the fund was launched, the real gap was in scaling up.