Mumbai-based Piper Serica Advisors Pvt Ltd, a SEBI-registered Category 1 Angel Fund which focusses on investing in early-stage tech-based startups, has raised Rs 75 crore from a wide range of investors. The fund expects to raise the remaining Rs 25 crore in a couple of months.
“We are investing in several high-quality companies and expect to have very profitable exits from them in line with our strategy. We are very happy with the presence we have created in the startup ecosystem. We are seeing very high-quality deal flow from other funds, platforms, and directly from founders,” Abhay Agarwal, Director of Piper Serica Advisors said.
Piper Serica launched its Rs 100 crore Category 1 Angel Fund in September 2022. Since then, it has invested in five companies and expects to back another 25-30 companies.
The five companies that Piper Serica has invested in include ALT Mobility, a full-stack EV leasing platform offering mobility as a service (MaaS) for commercial vehicle users; Crediwatch, an information intelligence platform to offer financial organisations big data risk analysis; ZFW Dark Stores, a physical network of micro warehouses (dark stores); Driffle, a marketplace built for gamers; and Oditly, an enterprise-scale SaaS application enabling businesses of all sizes to digitise and automate the entire lifecycle of quality, safety, and compliance processes.
In an official statement, Piper Serica said it helps its portfolio companies scale up by helping them acquire clients, build teams and raise further rounds of capital.
The seed-to-IPO fund already has a deal pipeline and aims to close eight more deals by March-end. These include a supply chain management company, a CRM tech company, a firm that provides a global escrow platform for enterprises offering domestic and cross-border escrow solutions, a cybersecurity company, and a learning management solution company to name a few.
“The much talked about funding winter has actually normalised the valuation expectation by founders. This is giving us access to good businesses run by very good founders and available at reasonable valuations,” Ajay Modi, Vice President of Piper Serica said.
