ETMarkets AIF Talk- The Dhoni moment! Next wave of startups will come from Tier II and III cities: Vignesh Shankar

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

“We are looking at investing in a business in Tier II, III cities. The government's initiatives and the ecosystem they've built are genuinely remarkable, some aspects even surpassing what the metros offer,” says Vignesh Shankar, Founder and Managing Partner at artha99. In an interview with ETMarkets, Shankar said: “I think the next wave is going to come from tier 2, tier 3 cities, what I call the Dhoni moment” Edited excerpts:Thanks for being part of the segment. Take us through the fund performance of Artha99 CAT 1 AIF. Thank you once again for having me here.

This marks the initiation of our second fund, building upon our prior experience with the first fund. The inaugural fund was structured as a proprietary fund, backed by our personal capital, in collaboration with a few friends from our school. The nomenclature «Artha99» derives from our school year of completion, which was 1999.

I'd like to provide insights into both these funds. In the first fund, we strategically allocated investments across diverse sectors, including Digital Yoga, Digital Transformation, Mapping Technology, and a player in the low-code, no-code sphere within the Shopify ecosystem. This portfolio yielded multiple outcomes: firstly, we successfully exited one investment, the digital transformation enterprise, generating substantial returns.

Additionally, a couple of our other investments have successfully secured Series A funding rounds. One company is a typical startup, it's not shut, but it's still not exactly grown to the extent we anticipated. Summing up the performance of the first fund, we currently exhibit an Internal Rate of Return (IRR) of nearly 70%.