An INR 100 Crore Angel Fund for Tech Startups from Indovation Supported by IIIT Hyderabad

The SucSEED Indovation Fund has received licence as Angel Fund in the Category 1 AIF from market regulator SEBI. The INR 100 Crore fund is sponsored by a group of active investors-mentors to nurture tech innovation and back early stage tech startups engaged in solving problems of masses, using emerging deep-tech innovations.  

The Fund has grown out of SucSEED Angels Network and IIIT Hyderabad Tech Ventures, an early stage tech seed initiative with the IIIT Hyderabad Foundation. It is sponsored by serial angel investors, mentors, industry leaders and people closely associated with the startup ecosystem for a long time. The Fund sees a team of proven leaders in tech and entrepreneurship, venture capital investment, risk management, funds, and transaction management, joining together for the sole purpose of bringing tech innovation to the market.

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The Fund will work towards strengthening the angel investment landscape by bringing institutional investors, family offices, HNIs, and upper middle class retail investors to actively participate in startup growth, while at the same time also providing startups with a comprehensive umbrella network for all their requirements.

“Today’s startups are tomorrow’s legendary companies and SucSEED Indovation Fund would focus on finding passionate and focused entrepreneurs and supporting them to find capital for building innovative tech solutions, solving problem for masses and scaling their businesses quickly,” Dhiraj Kumar Sinha, Co-founder of the Fund said.

“We will focus on the early-stage Tech ecosystem and support the ‘Atmanirbhar’ and ‘Digital Economy’ initiatives and solutions meeting needs of B2C customers as well as initiatives of corporates and governments,” J. A. Chowdary, Co-founder of the Fund said.

For the India Growth Story

The fund will focus on Indian startups and help the India growth story. It brings an extensive previous experience of working with Angel communities, which will provide the insights necessary in helping discover startups and develop the best ways of guiding portfolio companies towards their goals using mentoring programs. The fund is expected to play a significant role in building an ecosystem for deep tech-startups.

The SucSEED Indovation Fund has grown out of SucSEED Angel Network and IIITH Tech Ventures, an early stage tech seed initiative by the IIIT Hyderabad Foundation. It’s sponsored by serial angel investors, mentors, and industry leaders, and have been closely associated with the startup ecosystem for a long time.

While the SucSEED Angel Network was already supporting early stage investments, now investing through the Fund will bring in capital through a single entity in the cap-table of startups with additional focus on sectorial research, professional handling, and enhanced investor reporting. Being SEBI registered also ensures that investments done by the Fund meet governance and compliance standards for investors.

Theme of the Fund

Vikrant Varshney, Co-founder and Managing Partner of the Fund said in a statement that the Fund will work closely with technology incubators like CIE-IIITH, T-Hub, and many more. He revealed that its primary focus will be on tech innovations in edtech, fintech, health-tech, enterprise SaaS and B2B, security and regtech, digital economy, and smart city sectors.

“The Fund will help portfolio companies strengthen their product offering, go-to-market strategy, and build high levels of governance and transparency so that they progress to become category leaders. We will drive investments in seed to pre-series A stages and initially invest in about 20 startups on an annual basis before rapidly increasing the scale of our operations and impact,” he said.

The Fund will invest in three Buckets:

Bucket A – Seed Fund – 15-20% of investible amount – towards early/seed stage ranging between INR 25-50 lakhs investment per startup

Bucket B – Growth Capital – 40-50% – towards growth capital ranging between INR 60 lakhs to INR 2 crores investment per startup

Bucket C – Pre-Series/ Bridge Round – 30-40% – towards follow-on capital or joining Pre-Series A investments ranging between INR 2-7 crores investment per startup

About SucSEED Angels Network

SucSEED Venture Partners, founded in 2016, runs the SucSEED Angels Network with a combination of more than 130 CXO level corporate professionals, technology angels, business leaders and serial entrepreneurs, who have come together to fuel the growth of the Indian startup system.

They help with provision of growth capital, organizing access to market, and business mentoring. SucSEED’s investment strategy is primarily targeted at the growth stage in post revenue startups involved in use cases with real problem statements using emerging technology.

Partners and team members of the Fund have 100+ years of cumulative experience within technology, fund management and startup ecosystem and have already invested in 40+ companies. SucSEED has been investing in diverse domains. In edtech, they have investments in K-12 lifecycles, STEM, to college and beyond in organizations such as OckyPocky, Xplorabox, Tinkerly and LetzConnect.

In fintech and card analytics, they pitched in two rounds of funding in i2iFunding and other firms such as Paymatrix, Insense, and Stockal. They also have their hands in realtytech and city solutions with MML, Kenyt and Paymatrix.