Stellaris Venture launches its largest ever $300 million fund

Bengaluru: Stellaris Venture Partners, which has backed companies such as personal care brand Mamaearth and SaaS startup Whatfix, announced the launch of its largest ever fund with a corpus of $300 million on Thursday.

The new fund will continue backing early-stage tech startups in the seed and series A stages and will invest in 25-30 startups over the next three years. It usually participates as the lead investor in these rounds and supports companies with multiple rounds of subsequent financing.

“With this new fund, we’re excited to back founders using technology to solve deep problems in large markets,” said Rahul Chowdhri, partner at Stellaris. Its previous two funds were $225 million and $90 million, respectively.

With this new fund, the investment firm has more than $600 million in assets under management (AUM) and has seen repeat investments from existing limited partners (LPs) as well as new commitments from top-tier global investors including university endowments, foundations, pension funds, and reputed Fund of Funds.

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“Our objective was to raise between $250-300 million even though the demand was significantly higher than that as the fund was heavily oversubscribed. But we decided to put a cap as we don’t want to raise a fund more than this threshold right now,” Alok Goyal, partner at Stellaris said. He added that the current corpus is the right size to be able to deploy over the next 4 years and reflects the growing opportunity of India’s early-stage ecosystem.

Backed predominantly by foreign institutional investors (FIIs), the investment firm has an average ticket size of $0.5 to $3 million for seed stage deals and $3.5 to $10 million for series A deals and invests across b2b commerce, consumer-tech, fintech, SaaS.

“With its $4 trillion GDP growing at 6-8% per annum, India is one of the few markets in the world offering both scale and growth to deliver venture returns. A combination of unique public digital infrastructure, a young population, mass adoption of smartphones and receptivity of public markets to technology startups makes India an attractive destination for venture capital,” added Ritesh Banglani, partner, Stellaris Venture Partners.

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Founded in 2017, Stellaris has backed 44 tech startups across its first two funds, 60% of which were inception-stage businesses. In recent times, the firm has backed EV financing startup Turno, credit-on-UPI provider Kiwi, AI SaaS companies Orbitshift and CARPL.ai, credit improvement platform Goodscore and D2C consumer brand Nestasia.