Venture capital firm Speciale Invest is launching a new investment vehicle that will look to invest in Series A and later rounds—a shift from the firm’s focus on pre-seed and seed-stage bets. The deep-tech focused firm is looking to line up a target corpus of Rs 1,400 crore.
Speciale Invest will look to write cheques between $5 million and $8 million, with about 30%-40% of the total corpus allocated for follow-on investments.
According to Vishesh Rajaram, Managing Partner at Speciale Invest, the vehicle was launched to bridge the dearth of growth-stage capital in a sector that is burgeoning.
“We have discovered that deep-tech is not an experiment. It is becoming mainstream,” he told YourStory.
“As the sector gains prominence, more investors will come and invest in the sector, which is good for the sector. Our most educated guess is that many of them will invest small amounts of money very early. Therefore, more companies will get started, and more companies will have deep tech capital. Our belief is that many of these companies will also need growth capital support. Given that this segment is now taking off, growth capital support may not be adequately available. And this is something that we relate to quite heavily among the 30+ companies that we have invested across the last eight years,” he added.
The new fund comes at a time when there is heightened focus and thinning growth-stage capital being pumped into deep-tech startups.
This news comes months after Speciale Invest closed its Rs 600 crore Fund III—double the size of its previous fund. The firm, which has been the first institutional investor in companies like Agnikul Cosmos and Metastable Materials, has been investing in the deep-tech segment for around eight years, giving the VC firm prowess over this sector.
To help the firm with new investments, Speciale Invest has elevated Venture Partner Vijay Jacob to General Partner—Growth.
“There is no change in the sectors that we’ll be looking at,” Jacob told YourStory. Speciale Invest will continue to make bets in space-tech, energy, artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, and biosciences. “The key insight is that technical difficulty that translates into a competitive advantage is something that does not change when we move from seed-stage to growth-stage,” he noted.
Speciale Invest expects its new investment vehicle’s portfolio to be a mix of existing companies and new investments. “We will look to invest in the best companies, whether it’s part of our portfolio or not,” Jacob said.
The strategy shift is also expected to attract institutional investors as limited partners in the fund, Rajaram noted. He added that since this fund will back Series A and above companies where technology risk has been mitigated, institutional investors are likely to show a larger interest.
The firm is currently eyeing sectors such as quantum energy, defence tech, and semiconductors, General Partner Arjun Rao told YourStory.
