‘More an overheated summer than a funding winter in FY23’
NEW DELHI : Prime Venture Partners is one of the few venture capital firms that has continued to invest in early-stage startups despite challenges in the past year that saw even larger investors turn cautious. Founded in 2012 by Sanjay Swamy, Shripati Acharya and Amit Somani, the homegrown VC fund (formerly known as AngelPrime) floated its first fund with a corpus of $8 million. The firm is currently deploying its $120 million fourth fund that closed in 2022.
A backer of startups such as Cred, MyGate, Ezetap, Affable.ai, Niyo Global, Tracxn and MyCointainer, Prime is a sector-agnostic firm with investments ranging from fintech to software-as-a-service (SaaS) segments. In an interview, co-founder Swamy spoke about the firm’s investment thesis, why it has continued a focused portfolio and how it handles founder-investor relations. Edited excerpts: All the founders come from a tech background.
As a result, this approach of investing in tech comes naturally to us. We believe investing in early-stage startups is an area where our experience can play a big role. We would want to work alongside the founders as much as possible, unlike other early-stage players who look at things from a volume perspective.
As a result, we are also actively engaged in our portfolio companies’ regular operator-type activities, which would be a hard thing to do in a large portfolio. As for the future, not much will change fundamentally. We will continue to make four to six investments every year.
It leaves more capital for follow-on rounds. We have traditionally been strong in the fintech space due to our backgrounds. We’ve had some good companies in the SaaS space as well.
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