Pi Ventures Launches New Fund for Tech Start-Ups

Early-stage investor Pi Ventures on Tuesday announced its second fund with a corpus of Rs 565 crore.

Approvals from the Securities and Exchange Board of India were received in March this year for the second venture capital fund that has a target corpus of Rs 565 crore and a green-shoe option of Rs 185 crore, a statement said.

Pi Ventures is looking to back around 25 global disruptors from India via this fund, it added.

With Fund II, Pi will continue to focus on early-stage (seed/pre-Series A/Series A) investments in start-ups focused on disruptive AI as well as ventures going beyond digital deep tech in areas like space technologies, material science, biotech and life sciences, the statement said.

Pi Ventures is looking at closing the targeted corpus within this year and will be deployed over the next four years.

With Fund 1, Pi has so far invested in 13 category-defining deep tech start-ups like Niramai, Locus, Wysa, Agnikul and Pyxis among others.

Established in 2016 by Manish Singhal, Pi Ventures closed its Fund I of Rs 225 crore (USD 30 million) in 2017-18. 

The first fund attracted several prominent investors from around the globe like CDC UK, IFC World Bank, SIDBI, Hero Enterprise chairman Sunil Kant Munjal, Electronic Development Fund (managed by Canbank Ventures), the corporate financing arm of Hero Electronix, In Colour Capital from Canada, Accel Partners and prominent family offices and entrepreneurs such as Binny Bansal, Bhupen Shah, Raghuveer Tarra and Ullas Kamath among others.

"We are very excited to launch our second fund and continue our mission to back start-ups that are creating global solutions from India. With AI and other technologies steadily maturing, we can expect some interesting applications in the coming days," Manish Singhal, co-founder and Managing Partner at Pi Ventures, said.

The aim of this fund is to support talented entrepreneurs, who are creating disruptive products that are solving big fundamental problems, with unique solutions on the back of technology innovations, he added. 

"So far, our investment strategy has worked extremely well and we have a healthy portfolio of companies that have scaled massively despite the current pandemic situation. Over the last two years, we have built a strong team that has delivered outstanding performance thereby strengthening our vision of helping make India a DeepTech nation," he said.