Arkam Ventures was floated by Rahul Chandra, co-founder and former managing partner at Helion Venture Partners, and Kalaari Capital’s Bala Srinivasa.
Institutional investors including UK’s development finance institution, British International Investment Plc, Nippon India Digital Innovation, Dubai-based Evolvence group, Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI), and other global fund-of-funds as well as Indian family offices and high net-worth individuals, have backed the fund.
Individual backers include
InfoEdge founder Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal, and Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma.
Around 40% of the corpus raised by Arkam has come from rupee-denominated capital, Chandra told ET. The delay in closing the fund was due to the Covid-19 pandemic and its related uncertainty, especially in 2020, he said.
Chandra left Helion in 2017 and launched Unitary Helion, which was rebranded as Arkam when he announced the first close in June 2020. Helion, an early investor in companies like BigBasket, MakeMyTrip, among others, was among the country’s oldest homegrown venture funds and has now ceased to operate.
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Arkam’s portfolio consists of 12 companies including Zerodha-backed investment platform Smallcase, savings app Jar, B2B marketplace Jumbotail, agri-finance startup Jai Kisan, lending company KrazyBee, and
crypto investment platform Mudrex, among others.
“We will continue to back startups in mobility, fintech, edtech/skilling, health and agriculture across B2B and B2C.These have to cater to middle India,” Chandra said.
The fund will make six additional investments in the $3 million range and focus on pre-series A to series B deals.
Early-stage investing in India has been competitive with larger funds like Sequoia Capital and Accel wanting to get in first, but Chandra said the fund has been able to win their share of the deal. He, however, said that the deal velocity had slowed in the past few months due to global headwinds.
During his stint at Helion, Chandra invested in financial institutions Spandana and Equitas which have gone public in the past few years.
He also backed companies including LetsBuy and Toppr, which were acquired by Flipkart and Byju’s later.
While he was at Kalaari, Srinivasa backed startups including Upstox, Jumbotail, risk management solution CreditVidya, and HR solution Mettl, which was bought by consulting firm Mercer.
VC funds have racked up massive dry powder amid a frenzied dealmaking period in 2021.
Last week, Elevation Capital (formerly Saif partners), an early backer of Swiggy and Paytm,
announced a $670 million fund for India, its largest till date.
In March, Accel said
it had mopped up $650 million, while its Silicon Valley-peer Sequoia Capital is on track to shore up $2.8 billion for its latest India and Southeast Asia fund.
Other newer venture capital firms like
Stellaris Venture Capital,
A91 Partners, and Sixth Sense Ventures, have also doubled or tripled their fund sizes to focus on India investments.
With the final close of its maiden fund, Arkam will continue to focus on verticals including financial services, healthcare, food and agriculture, education, logistics as well as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms.
It will mostly be focused on early-stage companies writing cheque sizes in the range of Rs 10 crore to Rs 20 crore, it said.
