India Quotient secures $64 mn for fourth fund

Early-stage venture capital firm India Quotient said on Tuesday it has raised $64 million (Rs 474.2 crore) for its fourth fund.  

The fund was launched in February with an aim to build a corpus of $80 million from domestic and global allocations, India Quotient said. 

The venture capital firm said that the domestic leg was hugely oversubscribed and the fund was in discussions with global investors for the rest of the money. It raised the fund from top family offices and other institutional investors in India. 

India Quotient said it welcomed Gagan Goyal, an ex-entrepreneur and IIT Bombay alumnus as a general partner in the team along with founders Anand Lunia and Madhukar Sinha.  

Lunia was chief financial officer of venture capital firm Seedfund, while Sinha was a senior investment manager at impact investor Aavishkaar. Later, Prerna Bhutani and Goyal, both entrepreneurs, joined as partners at India Quotient. 

“While everyone has been talking about investing in returning founders, we feel that great innovation sometimes needs freshers, youngsters and first-time entrepreneurs,” Lunia, founding partner of India Quotient, said.  

“A small fund allows us to focus on concept stage investments and allows us to aim for high fund multiples,” he added. 

The new fund’s aim was to invest in 35-40 startups in sectors such as software-as-a-service (SaaS), social media, direct-to-consumer (D2C), fintech and edtech, India Quotient had said in February.

India Quotient, a paper stage investor, has backed startups like ShareChat, Sugar Cosmetics, and PagarBook. It typically gives out the first cheque for a startup backing them with funds in the range of $250,000-1.25 million.