Singapore-headquartered Grayscale Ventures has secured the first close of its debut fund, raising about half its target size of$ 20 million. Innovated by Siddharth Verma and Nikhil Kapur, the 10-Year term fund plans to invest in 15-20 startups in the pre-seed stage. So far, it has invested in many startups, including Olvy, a provider of pall- grounded feedback software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, and Localwell, a mobile SaaS incipient for Indian pharmaceutical retailers.
Grayscale Ventures generally invests in startups with some interpretation of a product ready, before the product- request-fit stage. It’s also likely to consider pre-product-stage companies on rare occasions, according to Verma. Siddharth Verma mentioned that in the morning of 2022, the fund began engaging with implicit limited partners( LPs). The LPs were intrigued by the prospect of investing in sectors with significant growth eventuality, which could potentially give rise to the coming generation of sizable enterprises.
Having gained confidence from their investments at STRIVE, Siddharth Verma and Nikhil Kapur decided to produce a fund that concentrates on the Indian SaaS sector. They invested between $ 18 million and $ 20 million in the former six times, and the investments have generated a 7X MOIC (multiple on invested capital) in India and Southeast Asia, which boosted their confidence in starting their own fund. The brace preliminarily worked at STRIVE, backing pre-seed backing rounds in India for companies including Hasura, Classplus, 100ms, Reshamandi and Testsigma.
During their time at STRIVE, the two authors also led secondary deals and combinations and accessions for portfolio enterprises similar to Hasura, SuperK and PopXO. Grayscale Ventures has formerly invested in SaaS- grounded launch-up Olvy and pharmaceutical billing software provider Localwell. The advertisement comes at a time when Indian start-ups are floundering to secure backing investments, although adventure capital and private equity finances have been launched to support the sector. In February, PeerCapital completed the first check of its demoiselle fund, raising $37.5 million.