IvyCap Ventures has announced the first close of its Fund 3 at Rs 1608 crores (USD 214mn). One of the largest homegrown Venture Capital Fund in India, IvyCap currently manages assets worth INR 3200 crores (USD 425 mn). The fund is targeting to do its final close at Rs 2000 crore. However, looking at the demand and the fund strategy, it may increase the size to Rs 2500 crore. Two-thirds of the Fund 3 has been raised from its existing investors. There are quite a few new Institutional Investors including banks, insurance companies and the government departments who have participated in the Fund. In addition, IvyCap for the first time has also raised its capital from many family offices.

IvyCap currently manages a portfolio of over 30 companies and has already made successful exits in six companies including a partial exit in Purplle last year where its Fund 1 saw a 22x cash return for its investment. Fund 1 (INR 240 crores/USD 40 mn) was launched in 2014 and invested in 10 companies while Fund 2 (INR 535 crores/USD 80 mn) was launched in 2020 and invested in 23 companies.  Some of the companies in the portfolio are Purplle, Clovia, BlueStone, Biryani by Kilo, Convosight, Miko, Elucidata, ftcash, and others. Our recent exits include Purplle, Pharmarack and Leixir. Recent investment in portfolio companies Miko and Biryani By Kilo have been made from Fund 3.

As a venture capital fund, IvyCap has many firsts to its name: (1) It is the first Indian VC Fund to have received majority commitments from domestic financial institutions with over 25 Indian institutions participating across its Funds. (2) It is the first Indian VC Fund to have generated a Dragon in the portfolio. (A dragon is a company that gives you more than 1x cash return of the entire Fund size). (3) It is the first and the only VC Fund in the world that is sponsored by the IIT Alumni Trust, a collective pool of global IIT alumni. 

With its Fund 3, IvyCap will continue to focus on areas like Consumertech, Deeptech, Healthtech, Fintech, SaaS, Edtech, etc. The Fund will deploy an average of INR 30 to 40 crores as its first cheque in around 20-30 new Series A companies. In addition, the Fund will reserve around 20% of the corpus for co-investing in its existing portfolio from Fund 2. The balance Funds will be reserved as follow on the entire portfolio. 

Commenting on the close, Vikram Gupta, Founder and Managing Partner, IvyCap Ventures Advisors Pvt Ltd, said, “We have proven the model of working through the Alumni ecosystem of the IITs, IIMs and a few other top educational institutions of India. Our passion lies in building the Endowment ecosystems in India. We had conceptualised the Endowment Fund model through integration with an Alumni focused Venture Capital Fund in 2011. Our efforts led to the formation of India’s first Endowment Fund at IIT Delhi that was launched by the Hon. President of India in October 2019. This model was then replicated by IIM Ahmedabad and a few other IITs. Today we see a substantial alumni base of 500,000 from IITs and IIMs working very passionately with us.” 

IvyCap’s Fund 3 has integrated the SDG (Sustainable Development Goals)/ESG approach in its investing philosophy. Every company that it is investing in will map its objectives with at least one of the 17 goals of the United National SDG framework. The Fund will track its portfolio companies on the objective metric of 169 targets behind these goals using a detailed GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) metric. In an effort to focus on SDG/ESG IvyCap recently acquired a company called Fandoro that has been doing SDG consulting over several years. 

Started by Vikram Gupta in 2011, IvyCap built a venture capital model around the global IIT Alumni ecosystem with endowment at its core. It is the first Indian VC Fund to have created a unique mentoring model through passionate Alumni mentors. Today IvyCap has over 65 core mentors with an additional 5000 alumni in its inner circle of support. With every exit, the mentor trust receives a payout. Interestingly, so far 70% of this payout has been given back by mentors for Endowment to their Alma Maters. Historically, 20% of IIT Alumni have been entrepreneurs once in their careers. More than 50% of the Unicorns in India have at least one IITian in their founding or leadership team. Even globally, amongst the 1000 Unicorns, IITian alumni Founded Unicorns rank number fourth. 

The core founding team including Ashish Wadhwani, Vishal Gauri and Anju Gupta along with Vikram Gupta were all in IIT Delhi together at the same time. The fund also has highly credible advisory board including Former Home and Commerce Secretary, GK Pillai, Pradeep Gupta, Chairman of IIT Alumni Trust along with deans of various IITs. IvyCap is the first Indian VC Fund to have created a platform called IvyCamp that creates substantial engagement amongst entrepreneurs, corporates, university campuses, investors, and mentors. Today, IvyCamp has 3000+ curated startups and 50+ corporates in its network.