Listen: Unitus Ventures on the resilience of non-discretionary product businesses during crises

As the global lockdown on account of the Covid-19 crisis runs into months together, venture capital firms, large and small, are in the middle of deploying survival strategies for their portfolio companies and in turn for themselves.

In the sixth episode of the TechCircle #CapitalCall podcast series, Srikrishna Ramamoorthy, partner at Seattle and Bengaluru based impact investor Unitus Ventures spoke about recovery in parts of its portfolio, notably sectors such as fintech and jobtech, investee companies that have been hit harder than others, and the overall outlook for the portfolio and investments ahead.

“We’ve typically not invested in companies that are consumer facing or B2C that require large amounts of capital for say, customer acquisition and marketing,” Ramamoorthy told TechCircle.

Unitus is currently making investments from a Rs 300 crore fund that invests at the early stage. This is the firm’s second fund. Its first fund, raised in 2013 with a Rs 140 crore corpus, has backed about 17 companies. The portfolio includes intra-city logistics service Blowhorn, online Math learning tuitions provider Cuemath, and crowdsourcing platform Milaap.