pi Ventures Raises INR 100 Crore From SIDBI's FFS pi Ventures will continue to invest in startups focused on disruptive AI and other forms of deep tech across sectors
By Teena Jose
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Early-stage venture fund pi Ventures, which invests in disruptive artificial intelligence and deeptech startups, has received a commitment of INR 100 crore or 15% of the corpus out of Fund of Funds for startups managed by SIDBI. This is nearly 2.5 times of what FFS had invested in the first fund. The investment comes soon after pi Ventures announced an investment of INR 22 crores from Belgium's Colruyt Group in its second fund. In Jan 2022, the company announced the first close of its second fund at INR 303.5 crore, raising funds from entrepreneurs, HNIs and Family Offices from across the globe. With the commitment out of FFS, the fund is on track to do its final close in the second quarter of CY 2023 in the range of 675 crore to 750 crore. The fund is backed by BII, Nippon India Digital Innovation AIF (NIDIA), Accel, Colruyt and entrepreneurs and family offices such as 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, pi Ventures.
pi Ventures will continue to focus on early stage (seed/ pre-Series A/Series A) investments via this fund. Their strategy will be to invest in startups focused on disruptive AI and other forms of deep tech across sectors.
Established in 2016 by Manish Singhal, pi Ventures is an early-stage venture capital fund pioneering AI and deep tech investments in India. Fund of Funds for Start-ups (FFS) was unveiled by the Hon'ble Prime Minister on January 16, 2016 in line with the Start-up India Action Plan. It has a corpus of INR 10,000 crore for contribution to various Alternative Investment Funds (AIFs) registered with SEBI. SIDBI acting as an operating manager for Fund of Funds for Start-ups (FFS) programme is working with the vision to encourage the Government agenda of boosting entrepreneurship by providing indirect funding to emerging Start-ups through the provision of funds to venture capital (VC) funds present in the Indian startup ecosystem.
