IvyCap Ventures Raises Rs 1608 Cr; Announces First Close For Its Fund 3

IvyCap Ventures on Wednesday announced the first close of its Fund 3 at Rs 1608 crore (USD 214 Mn). IvyCap currently manages assets worth Rs 3200 crore (USD 425 Mn). The fund is targeting to do its final close at Rs 2000 crore. However, looking at the demand and the fund strategy, it may increase the size to Rs 2500 crore. Two-thirds of the Fund 3 has been raised from its existing investors. There are quite a few new Institutional Investors including banks, insurance companies and the government departments who have participated in the Fund. In addition, IvyCap for the first time has also raised its capital from many family offices.

IvyCap currently manages a portfolio of over 30 companies and has already made successful exits in six companies including a partial exit in Purplle last year where its Fund 1 saw a 22x cash return for its investment. Fund 1 (Rs 240 crore/USD 40 mn) was launched in 2014 and invested in 10 companies while Fund 2 (Rs 535 crore/USD 80 mn) was launched in 2020 and invested in 23 companies.  Some of the companies in the portfolio are Purplle, Clovia, BlueStone, Biryani by Kilo, Convosight, Miko, Elucidata, ftcash, and others. Recent exits include Purplle, Pharmarack and Leixir. Recent investment in portfolio companies Miko and Biryani By Kilo have been made from Fund 3.

With its Fund 3, IvyCap aims to continue focusing on areas like Consumertech, Deeptech, Healthtech, Fintech, SaaS, Edtech, etc. The Fund will deploy an average of Rs 30 to 40 crore as its first cheque in around 20-30 new Series A companies. In addition, the Fund will reserve around 20% of the corpus for co-investing in its existing portfolio from Fund 2. The balance Funds will be reserved as follow on the entire portfolio. 

Commenting on the close, Vikram Gupta, Founder and Managing Partner, IvyCap Ventures Advisors, said, “We have proven the model of working through the Alumni ecosystem of the IITs, IIMs and a few other top educational institutions of India. Our passion lies in building the Endowment ecosystems in India. We had conceptualised the Endowment Fund model through integration with an Alumni focused Venture Capital Fund in 2011. Our efforts led to the formation of India’s first Endowment Fund at IIT Delhi that was launched by the Hon. President of India in October 2019. This model was then replicated by IIM Ahmedabad and a few other IITs. Today we see a substantial alumni base of 500,000 from IITs and IIMs working very passionately with us.” 

IvyCap’s Fund 3 has integrated the SDG (Sustainable Development Goals)/ESG approach in its investing philosophy. Every company that it is investing in will map its objectives with at least one of the 17 goals of the United National SDG framework. The Fund will track its portfolio companies on the objective metric of 169 targets behind these goals using a detailed GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) metric. In an effort to focus on SDG/ESG IvyCap recently acquired a company called Fandoro that has been doing SDG consulting over several years.