Multiply Ventures, an early-stage VC fund started by former Myntra, Flipkart, and Paytm executives, Raveen Sastry, Sanjay Ramakrishnan and Bhushan Patil announces the closure of its maiden fund. A thesis-driven, domestic fund that specializes in investments in consumer tech, has raised INR 260 crore for its maiden fund, a little above the targeted Rs 250 Crore. The fund focuses on early-stage deals across four core sectors – fintech, edtech, retail, and health.
The fund, earlier received its SEBI approval to launch the fund in 2020 and the fund completed its final close recently. The three partners built a portfolio of 30 companies as angels before embarking on launching a structured fund. Some of the notable companies in the Pre-fund include Open Financial, DealShare, Gramophone, ShopKirana, Madstreet Den, and Skill Lync.
Sanjay Ramakrishnan, Partner, Multiply said, “We are thesis-driven in our investment and the broad thesis is that -India will see the emergence of trusted brands that will improve access to quality education, transparent financial services, affordable healthcare and authentic retail experiences. Technology will be a unifying catalyst across all sectors. We have a sub-thesis for each of the four sectors. The thesis is our governing framework and keeps evolving.”
“We are on our path to setting up an operational VC firm, joining hands with Startups as extended partners, which is essential for the Indian ecosystem. While the digital ecosystem has evolved locally, many innovations across sectors will come from early-stage startups which will need support beyond the capital. The right selection, getting in early, and building for larger consumer segments have proven to get the best impact and investment returns for us and we will continue to build on this,” said Bhushan Patil, Partner, Multiply.
“For example, today over the 1 trillion dollar Fintech economy, we are still just scratching the surface. We are witnessing many nascent stage startups across sectors like infrastructure,credit, digitizing BFSI products, building tech-led distribution, identity systems for mass adoption, financial literacy, and inclusion. All these need expertise from the core BFSI domain, global digitization models/methods, how-to’s of building a brand, customer trust, expert views about compliance & regulations, and most importantly awareness of the unit economics to build profitable businesses. We as a team bring these much earlier in the business life cycles of the startups we are bringing under our portfolio,” adds Bhushan.
