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Early-stage investor venture fund Pi Ventures has secured a commitment of Rs 100 crore from the Fund of Funds Scheme (FFS) for startups.

With the commitment out of the Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI)-managed fund, pi Ventures is on track to make the final close of its second fund in the June-ended quarter of 2023. The company estimated the fund to be in the range of Rs 675 crore to Rs 750 crore.

The inflow from FFS comes a few days after pi Ventures announced an investment of Rs 22 crore from Belgium’s Colruyt Group in its second fund. 

The venture capital firm announced the first close of its Fund II at Rs 303.5 crore in Jan 2022, with investments from entrepreneurs, HNIs and family offices from across the globe. 

The fund is backed by BII, Nippon India Digital Innovation AIF (NIDIA), Accel, Colruyt, and entrepreneurs and family offices including Binny Bansal, Varun Alagh, Samit Shetty, Rajesh Ranavat, Anupam Mittal, Hemendra Kothari, Hitesh Oberoi, Ullas Kamath, Deep Kalra, senior leaders from IBM, Facebook, and Google among others. 

“We are delighted to welcome FFS again in our second fund. The confidence in our team and our investment strategy reinforces our commitment to support talented entrepreneurs who are creating disruptive products that solve fundamental real-world problems with innovative technology-backed solutions,” said Manish Singhal, Founding Partner of pi Ventures.

The company said it would continue to focus on early-stage investments via this fund. Its strategy is to invest in startups focused on disruptive AI and other forms of deep tech across sectors, including blockchain, space tech, biotech, and material science. 

So far, the venture capital firm has invested in seven startups—immunitoAI, Ottonomy.IO, Silence Laboratories, Preimage, and three other ventures. It plans to invest in 20-25 such startups in the next 2-3 years.

pi Ventures closed its Fund I at Rs 225 crore in 2018. The first fund has backed 15 deep tech startups, including Niramai, Pixis, Wysa, Agnikul, and Locus, to name a few. 

The second fund was launched in March 2021 with a base target corpus of Rs 675 crore, including a green shoe target of Rs 750 crore.

FFS’ second investment in pi Ventures is nearly 2.5X what it had invested in the first fund. The second investment is 15% of the corpus out of FFS, managed by SIDBI.

FFS was unveiled on January 16, 2016, in line with the Startup India Action Plan. It has a corpus of Rs 10,000 crore for contribution to various Alternative Investment Funds registered with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI).