SucSEED Indovation Fund announces first closing of $13.5 mn fund, 3 new investments

Hyderabad headquartered SucSEED Indovation on Monday announced the first closure of its maiden 100 crore ($13.5 million at current exchange rates) fund by raising Rs 40 crore

Along with the fund raise, SucSEED has identified three startups -- Stargate, Auris, and Freestand for investment and signed term sheets for them.

Through this corpus, SucSEED aims to support more than 50 startups until they become large enterprises over their three-stage funding thesis, according to a statement. SucSEED Indovation is a SEBI registered Alternative Investment Fund (AIF-1) and Venture Capital Angel Fund.

“We are excited to state an overwhelming response and oversubscription to our first closing of the maiden Rs 100 crore Fund. Angel Investors, CXOs in large domestic and global enterprises, Family offices, and few family Trusts have participated in the first successful closing of Rs 40 crore,” Vikrant Varshney, co-founder and managing partner of the Fund said.

Stargate is a direct-to-retail (D2R) cross-border platform for curated lifestyle products. While Auris, an AI-powered insights platform, curates insights in real-time to capture, enrich and analyse data, Freestand, a marketing technology platform enables FMCG brands to deliver physical product samples to digitally targeted customers, the company added.

The company also mentioned that it has shortlisted three startups in health-tech and regulatory-tech space, where the due-diligence is still underway.

“Our goal is to close 20 investments YoY, and we hope to accomplish this as we tap into new potential early-stage ventures,” Varshney added.

SucSEED says the second closing is targeted for February-March 2021.

The fund, according to the company, addresses the under-served formal fund needs of seed-stage technology startups. It will drive investments in seed to pre-series A-stages and will help portfolio companies to strengthen their product offerings, go-to-market strategy, and build governance structure so that they progress to become category leaders, the statement said.

The fund focuses on emerging sectors such as health-tech, edtech, fintech, enterprise SaaS, cybersecurity, regulatory-tech, digital economy and smart living which uses emerging deep-tech innovations.

SucSEED Indovation Fund has grown out of SucSEED Angel Network and IIITH Tech Ventures, an early-stage tech seed initiative with IIIT Hyderabad Foundation. It is sponsored by serial angel investors, mentors, industry leaders and is closely associated with the startup ecosystem for a long time.