Multi-Stage Support for Startups: SucSEED Indovation Ventures SucSEED's investment thesis focuses on discovering early-stage startups and providing capital and mentorship to foster growth, applying the 80-20 principle to maximise returns.
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In 2016, Vikrant Varshney and Dhiraj Sinha left their corporate careers to launch SucSEED Angel Network, aiming to support tech innovation and growth in startups. By 2017, they had expanded their reach by creating the IIIT-H Seed Fund for early-stage deep-tech startups, joined by Ramesh Loganathan and V.V.S.N. Raju.
The success of these ventures led to the launch of SucSEED Indovation Fund in 2020, focusing on early-stage deep-tech investments with a corpus growing from INR 100 crore to INR 300 crore.
By 2024, SucSEED introduced the SucSEED Indovation Growth Fund, a USD 100 million fund registered in GIFT City under IFSCA, aimed at investing in promising deep-tech startups at Pre-Series A, Series A, and Series B stages. This growth fund continues to support sectors like edtech, fintech, healthtech, security and regtech, gaming, sportstech, mediatech, enterprisetech SAAS, and digital economy and emerging tech.
SucSEED's investment thesis focuses on discovering early-stage startups and providing capital and mentorship to foster growth, applying the 80-20 principle to maximise returns.
Vikrant Varshney, Co-founder and Managing Partner of SucSEED Indovation Ventures, says, "We discover 80% of the startups at an early stage, when they are nimble companies incubating their products in established incubators and are at the pre-MVP or MVP stage (referred as Bucket A). With our capital and mentoring support, we help them grow, and subsequently, 80% of our fund's capital gets allocated to those startups that are growing rapidly and gaining traction in the market in two subsequent rounds (as Bucket B and Bucket C stage companies)."
"So around 20% of our overall portfolio receives 80% of the fund, ensuring a very strong yield. Most of the successful startups would have received up to INR 10 crore in funding (which is a regulatory threshold in our license category), spread over these 3 rounds of investments," he adds.
Over the past three years, SucSEED Indovation has invested in 60 unique startups, providing follow-on funding for 20 rounds across 18 portfolio companies. Notable startups showing significant growth include Seekho, Suraasa, Lissun, Nesa, Stack, EsportsXO, SportVot, IntelleWings, Spintly, we360.ai, Funngro, and SupplyNote.
Commenting on the investment outlook for FY 2024–25, Varshney says, "From Indovation Fund, our focus will be to keep discovering early-stage companies and do large follow-on rounds from the performing companies from our portfolio."
"SucSEED Indovation Growth Fund would look at the continued funnel from our Indovation Fund PortCo as well as pickup additional Series A and B startups from emerging markets," he adds.
The Hyderabad-based firm demonstrates its impact through examples like helping a RegTech startup secure HDFC as a client and supporting an EdTech company in securing strategic investments from the USA.
Facts:
- Portfolio Size: 60+
- Average ticket size: INR 1 Cr to INR 2 Cr
- Total Exits: 10 Exits (from previous investments)
- Total Assets Under Management: INR 280–300 Cr
