Zodius co-founder’s Z3Partners hits first close of debut venture capital fund

Z3Partners, a venture capital firm floated by a co-founder of early-stage technology investment firm Zodius Capital that was bought by Avendus, has marked the first close of its debut fund.

The Z3Partners Tech Fund has made the first close at Rs 100 crore ($13.6 million), a statement said. Gautam Patel is the founder and managing partner of Z3Partners.  

After the first close, a fund typically starts deploying money.

The vehicle seeks to raise a total of $100 million (around Rs 730 crore) by September.

The Limited Partners (LPs) in the fund are family offices and high net-worth individuals. The fund also aims to get commitments from a few institutional investors.

The vehicle will have an initial cheque size of $3-5 million. It will focus on early-growth companies in sectors such as e-commerce, business-to-business (B2B) commerce, fintech, data analytics, and software-as-a-service (SaaS). It also plans to invest in agritech and cybersecurity.

The fund aims to have a concentrated portfolio with investments in a total of eight to 10 startups.

It has already invested in cybersecurity startup Cyfirma and social commerce firm DealShare.

An email sent to Z3Partners for more details did not elicit an immediate response.

Zodius was led by Patel, Neeraj Bhargava and Shilpa Kulkarni. It backed companies such as AppsDaily, Bigbasket, FreshMenu, PepperFry and Zivame. In 2017, Avendus acquired Zodius.

Last year, Zodius co-founder Bhargava got funding for his new media firm Rainshine Entertainment Pvt. Ltd.

VC fundraising

Earlier this week, South Korean financial services firm Mirae Asset group, which has invested in Indian startups such as Ola, Zomato and Bigbasket, launched an India-focussed early-stage fund.

Endiya Partners also marked the final close of its new fund earlier this week, meeting its corpus target of Rs 500 crore ($70 million).

Last year, marquee investors including Sequoia, Elevation Capital (formerly SAIF Partners) and Lightspeed India Partners marked the final close of new funds.

Smaller homegrown venture capital firms such as Blume Ventures and Equanimity Investments also marked the final close of their funds while Unicorn India Ventures and Inflexor Ventures marked the first close of their funds.