Weekly rundown: Axilor Ventures to raise $100 mn second fund; Innoviti closes $45 mn round

Axilor Ventures, a seed fund launched by a group of tech veterans including Infosys co-founders Kris Gopalakrishnan and SD Shibulal, announced the launch of its second fund with a target corpus of $100 million. The fund’s target is almost four times the size of the first fund. Named Axilor Technology Fund – II, it has a 15-year tenure, unlike the typical 10-year VC fund lifecycles, which enables the investor to stay with its portfolio companies much longer. The longer tenure is possible as it is a proprietary fund with a majority of the target corpus coming from the family houses of Kris Gopalakrishnan and SD Shibulal, and the remaining amount pooled in by the other three founders Tarun Khanna, Srinath Batni, and Ganapathy Venugopal.

The fund will continue to back start-ups in enterprise SaaS, B2B commerce, agritech, consumer tech, fintech, and health-tech sectors. Venugopal said the fund will set aside 30 per cent of the new corpus for investing in 10-12 to performing from its first fund. With an average cheque size of $750,000 to $1 million, the fund expects to back about 100-125 start-ups over the next 10-12 years deployment.

Ahmedabad-based GVFL or Gujarat Venture Finance Ltd achieved the first close of its ninth fund at Rs 185 crore this week. The fund targets to raise Rs 500 crore. The Category-II Alternate Investment Fund (AIF) aims to back start-ups across edtech, healthtech, agritech, biotech and consumer business sectors. Its previous fund had invested in 13 start-ups including Sequretek, Frazzo, Qarmatek and Pet Pooja.

Campus Fund secured $10 million for its second fund to invest in student-led start-ups. The fund was raised from a host of limited partners including large institutions, GPs of leading funds, industry veterans, and family offices. A number of start-up founders including that of redBus, Delhivery, TaxiForSure, Sheroes, and Udhyam Learning have also backed the fund. It currently has a portfolio of 10 start-ups including Digantara, HealthySure, and Expand My Business.

Fintech startup Innoviti raised the largest round of the week when it closed its Series D funding round at $45 million. The Bengaluru-based point of sale (PoS) provider received a fresh tranche of $25 mn led by Singapore-based growth equity firm Panthera Growth Partners (PGP) to close the round. Panthera infused $15 million from its recently announced Fund II while the remaining amount came from new investors Alumni Ventures and Patni Family Office, and returning investors FMO and Bessemer Venture Partners. Innoviti has also raised debt from Trifecta Capital in this round. A clutch of individual investors such as Sanjoy Bhattacharya, Bharat Jaisinghani, and others also participated in this funding round.

The other significant funding round this week was raised by stock trading platform MarketWolf which secured a $10 million infusion led by Jungle Ventures and Dream Capital, the corporate venture unit of online gaming start-up Dream11’s parent firm Dream Sports. A handful of existing and new investors including 9Unicorns, iSeed, Crescent, and Riverwalk also participated in the round.