Fundamental VC launches $130-mn maiden fund for early-stage start-ups

Venture capital firm Fundamental VC on Friday said it has launched its maiden fund with a target corpus of $130 million (around Rs 1,014 crore) to invest in early-stage startups.

The sector-agnostic fund will actively evaluate ventures across spaces such as consumer internet, healthcare, insurance, financial services, SaaS, gaming, and artificial intelligence (AI), among others, the Bengaluru-based firm said in a statement.

The fund received capital markets regulator Sebi’s approval in March this year and has already started deploying capital with plans to lead investments in pre-seed and seed rounds.

The fund will invest up to $1.5 million in each startup and aims to support 30 startups over a period of two years.

Fundamental’s maiden fund is backed by an equal mix of domestic and international Limited Partners from geographies such as Singapore, the Middle East, and the US. The mix comprises a host of unicorn founders, high net worth individuals (HNIs), family offices, and senior technology executives, who have been long associated with the early-stage startup ecosystem as operators, digital-first entrepreneurs, domain experts, and enablers.

Fundamental VC is founded by former startup operators, Saswat Sundar and Abhishek Rathi.

”Our focus on early-stage startups is primarily due to our extensive experience-driven ability to understand the pulse of the ecosystem, and build companies from the ground-up and scale them globally,” Sundar said. ”In order to focus on the sustainable growth and success of each startup in our portfolio, we have a highly curative investment strategy, wherein, we will invest in a limited set of businesses with sound fundamentals instead of a spray-and-pray approach,” he added. From a strategic support standpoint, Fundamental VC has exclusive partnerships with several industry stalwarts to facilitate better GTM, user acquisition, product distribution, hiring, and growth strategy for its portfolio startups. ”Being associated with the early-stage startups’ ecosystem for over a decade and having seen cycles of thousands of startups from an idea stage to growth and beyond, we have realised that there is a strong need for an approachable institutional capital support for early-stage founders. Our vision is to fill this gap by being the most reliable, approachable, founder-centric, and smart institutional capital support from day zero,” Rathi said.