Multiply Ventures, an early-stage venture capital (VC) firm, said on Tuesday it closed its maiden fund at Rs 260 crore, exceeding its target of Rs 250 crore.
With a focus on early-stage deals across four core sectors—fintech, edtech, retail, and health—Multiply Ventures plans to invest in eight to 10 more startups in the next 12 months. It has already invested in 15 companies to date, including Nova Benefits, Freed, Bharat X, Nutty Yogi, Iluvia, and OneCare.
The Bengaluru-based VC firm was started by Myntra, Flipkart, and Paytm executives Raveen Sastry, Sanjay Ramakrishnan and Bhushan Patil, respectively, after the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) approved the fund in 2020. The fund’s focus will be on pre-seed and seed rounds. It also plans to invest till Series A rounds in companies that are growing efficiently.
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Multiply Ventures said the majority of the investors are Indian family offices and digital-first entrepreneurs. 95 percent of the investors are from India.
“We are on our path to setting up an operational VC firm, joining hands with startups as extended partners, which is essential for the Indian ecosystem. While the digital ecosystem has evolved locally, many innovations across sectors will come from early-stage startups which will need support beyond the capital. The right selection, getting in early, and building for larger consumer segments have proven to get the best impact and investment returns for us and we will continue to build on this”, said Bhushan Patil, Partner at Multiply Ventures.
“We are witnessing many nascent stage startups across sectors like infrastructure, credit, digitising BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) products, building tech-led distribution, identity systems for mass adoption, financial literacy, and inclusion. All these need expertise from the core BFSI domain, global digitization models/methods, how-tos of building a brand, customer trust, expert views about compliance and regulations, and most importantly, awareness of the unit economics to build profitable businesses. We, as a team, bring these much earlier in the business life cycles of the startups we are bringing under our portfolio,” he added.
Multiply Ventures said it plans to be the first institutional investor in the company. Its average first cheque will be Rs 4 crore, and will invest up to Rs 20 crore in some businesses.
“We are thesis-driven in our investment and the broad thesis is that India will see the emergence of trusted brands that will improve access to quality education, transparent financial services, affordable healthcare and authentic retail experiences. Technology will be a unifying catalyst across all sectors. We have a sub-thesis for each of the four sectors. The thesis is our governing framework and keeps evolving,” Sanjay Ramakrishnan, Partner at Multiply said.
