Antler India closes Rs 500 crore of maiden fund, to make final close soon
Antler India has closed Rs 500 crore of its Rs 600 crore ($75 million) maiden fund and is aiming to make the final close this quarter.
The domestic fund, which has been almost one-and-a-half years in the making, will be completely India-focused and is separate from the global Antler franchise.
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Offering CollegeCourseWebsiteIndian School of BusinessISB Professional Certificate in Product ManagementVisitIndian School of BusinessISB Product ManagementVisitIIM LucknowIIML Executive Programme in Data ScienceVisitIndian School of BusinessISB Applied Business AnalyticsVisitLast year, the Indian arm of Antler had set out to raise a Rs 400 crore base-fund, with a green-shoe option of Rs 200 crore.
Nearly Rs 325 crore of the overall corpus raised has seen participation from domestic pools of capital, including from Small Industries Development Bank of India.
Other investors in the fund included sovereign entities, healthcare endowments as well as Antler’s global limited partners.
With the corpus, Antler India is looking to back nearly 100 early stage startups at the idea to pre-seed stage, and will reserve a portion of the fund to double down on top portfolio performers.
“The interesting story here is that finally there is depth in the domestic capital market for essentially the company-formation stage. And this pool represents that. So, LPs (limited partners) are waking up to the game-changing potential (both through returns and impact) of investing in venture capital focused on really early stages,” Nitin Sharma, cofounder and general partner of Antler India, told ET.
Antler India has already invested 20% of the total corpus from its maiden fund, making 27 investments
