Together makes first close of $150 mn fund

livemint.com:

Together Fund, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, has made the first close of its second fund that has a corpus of $150 million. The proceeds of the fund will be used to make early stage investment in SaaS and artificial intelligence (AI) startups, the VC firm said on Thursday, adding the fund has already received commitments from institutional investors from the US and Asia. The firm didn’t say how much it raised in the fund’s first close.

Together Fund is led by founders of Freshworks and Eka Software, and a former executive of Matrix Partners. The latest fund, which comes two years after its maiden fund of $85 million, will add to the early-stage dry powder in the country. The fund, similar to the previous vehicle, will invest in areas such as SaaS, enterprise software, developer tools, open source software, cloud-native infrastructure, and API-first businesses, along with generative AI.

“We are at a liminal moment in history — a period of transformative transition where every business wakes up to the power of AI," the VC firm said. “Amid this paradigm shift, all of SaaS will transform to SaaS.AI—every startup leverages AI in a meaningful way to provide new solutions that are vastly superior to the status quo," it added. Together Fund has already invested in three Gen AI businesses in healthcare, developer infrastructure, and modern marketing stack in the last three months.

Together was co-founded by Girish Mathrubootham of Freshworks, Manav Garg of Eka Software, Shubham Gupta and Avinash Raghava, former executives of Matrix Partners and Accel respectively. Raghava has since left the VC firm and is currently chief executive of SaaSBOOMi. Together was started with a