Speciale Invest, a seed stage VC investing in deep technologies, has announced the first closing of its second fund.
The second fund exceeded its target and was oversubscribed with the backing of an experienced group of domestic investors, it said.
The fund expects to invest in about 18-20 startups building enterprise software products including SAAS, Developers tools and frontier technologies including Space Tech, Robotics, Photonics and Alternative Energy to name a few.
Speciale, which was founded in 2017 by Vishesh Rajaram and Arjun Rao, had raised its first fund in 2018 and invested in 14 cutting-edge startups so far, with an average deal size of sub $0.5 million. The investment strategy and portfolio construct continues to remain the same across funds, and a larger corpus allows for more follow-on allocation to the portfolio.
Speciale Invest Managing Partner Vishesh Rajaram said, “We are excited to announce the launch of our second fund to support and boost the deep-tech startup ecosystem in India amid the ongoing pandemic.”
The oversubscribed round of funding and interest in our subsequent round demonstrate the support of our investors in our team in creating a long standing venture institution, he added.
Speciale Invest General Partner Arjun Rao said, “We’re thrilled that our 2nd fund enables us to continue this journey of partnering with early stage founders building companies at the bleeding edge of innovation from India.”
“We take the learnings and progress from the 1st Fund portfolio as motivation to double down on our core deep tech thesis and strive harder to explore newer areas of tech & science led disruption,” he added.
Portfolio companies of Speciale Invest include enterprise software companies Wingman, True Lark, TotalCloud, Scapic, iAuro, Pocket52 and; and hardware startups The ePlane Company, Agnikul, Astrogate Labs, CynLr, and Kawa Space.
