Former Infy, Wipro execs-backed early stage fund Exfinity raises $17M to back startups

Reservoir Investment Managers, an early stage venture capital firm floated by IT industry bigwigs including former Infosys execs V Balakrishnan and Mohandas Pai among others, has hit the first close of its maiden fund Exfinity Technology Fund - Series I (ETF-I), as per a tweet by Balakrishnan on Wednesday.

The fund has raised Rs 100 crore ($17 million) and is now pushing forth for the final close with a greenshoe option of Rs 25 crore to raise Rs 125 crore in total.

Reservoir is the sponsor of ETF-I, a VC fund registered under SEBI's AIF Regulations 2012. The fund has a

five-year life with an option of two one-year extensions. It has a hurdle rate of 12 per cent with 2:15 management fee to carried interest ratio.

It would focus on products/services/applications targeting global footprint; investments in a mix of B2B and B2C space in early and emerging stage funding; technologies impacting key business processes, present economic, social and business issues - opportunities seen in enterprise space, Big Data and analytics, cloud computing, application development, e-commerce, education, healthcare, etc.

The fund was floated last year and counts marquee IT industry backers. Besides Balakrishnan and Mohandas Pai, it has Girish Paranjpe (former Wipro co-CEO) and  Deepak Ghaisas (founder of i-flex). Its advisory committee includes Paranjpe, Ghaisas, Pai and Sushil Mantri (a realtor).

Its management team is led by Shailesh Ghorpade, who had earlier started realty investment firm Azure Capital.

The move by Balakrishnan and Mohandas Pai to invest in Exfinity Fund comes close after both of them have made key investments in Unitus Seed Fund, which backs entrepreneurs who target the bottom-of-the-pyramid (BoP) market.

Mohandas Pai is also raising a sector-agnostic private equity fund along with Ranjan Pai of Manipal Group. Recently, both of them had invested in a technology accelerator fund called the Habit Fund.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)