Fund IV is awaiting approval from the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), with the final closure just six months away.
Inventus has also rebranded itself as Athera Venture Partners.
The fund’s launch comes at a time when deal making has slowed down and macro headwinds are hurting valuations of investment and technology companies.
Athera’s latest corpus is more than double its previous fund of Rs 369 crore, the final closure of which was announced in October 2019. Through its third fund, Athera invested in 13 new startups, including space-tech firm Pixxel; Interactive toy company Playshifu and automotive company Euler Motors.
This will be Athera’s second exclusive India-focused fund. The firm has been investing in Indian startups since 2006. Athera’s first two funds focused on investment opportunities across India and the United States.
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The fourth fund is expected to have an equal mix of domestic and international Limited Partners (LPs), with Phanindra Sama of RedBus and key founders of its portfolio companies including Policybazaar’s Yashish Dahiya and Alok Bansal also investing as part of the fundraise .
“Over the past few weeks, we have met some of our existing LPs and all of them have said that they will come back to the fund with a larger check size. This has boosted our confidence irrespective of the environment,” Sameer Kumar, Managing Director and General Partner, Athera Venture Partners told ET. “We have several companies that have given good exits and people have committed to look at the DPI (distribution in paid-in) data that we have. We will stay focused despite the noise with our heads down. ,
In addition to supporting consumer Internet and software startups, Athera will also look to invest in upcoming areas including blockchain and Web3, as well as seizing opportunities in the deep-tech, electric vehicles and space-tech sectors.
improvement on the horizon
Investment activity has slowed in the first half of this year, while the pace of bargaining has picked up in 2021.
Global funds including Y Combinator, Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners have already issued advisories to their portfolio companies on the slowdown.
“It takes around 7-9 years for a startup to scale up and eventually deliver results. So, it is a very long journey, and you are bound to see several economic cycles in that journey, and if you are coming early it eventually smooths out,” said Rutvik Doshi, general partner at Athera Venture Partners , the fourth fund amid the downturn in the market
Doshi said that the total fund of Athera could go up to around Rs 1,300 crore. “The good thing about investing is self-improvement. This particular downturn will heal on its own. So, discipline is essential, and this is a 10-year game, where you can’t see markups every three months, said Parag Dhol, general partner, Athera Venture Partners.
Dhol said his advice to entrepreneurs is to balance growth with new initiatives, while showing growth and profitability in their core businesses.
Athera is looking to write checks of Rs 5 crore to Rs 10 crore for startups in the initial phase and is expected to go up to Rs 30 crore for the initial phase bets. With the new corpus, it will try to keep 10-15% of the fund corpus to support some high growth startups in its portfolio.
“Pricing (of deals) is definitely happening right now. Some of the early stage deals where the mean went up would be correct to 20%-30%… ‘outliers of excess’ where there are repeat founders (start ups) or well-known people in the ecosystem who are at higher valuations Without any product or substance to raise funds, such deals will slow down,” Doshi said.
Top-tier VCs including Accel and Elevation Capital have closed their latest fund and increased their corpus size on the back of a record-breaking year for funding Indian startups.
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