AngelPrime raises US$47 million and rebrands itself as Prime Venture Partners

Bangalore-based seed stage VC fund AngelPrime today announced a new round of funding led by The Social+Capital Partnership along with undisclosed institutional investors from New York, Hong Kong, Singapore, Silicon Valley, and across Europe. AngelPrime raised INR 3 billion (US$46.9 million) and has been renamed Prime Venture Partners.

Prime Venture Partners is headed up by Sanjay Swamy, Shripati Acharya, and Amit Somani. and plans to remain an early-stage investor in technology startups, maintaining its deep involvement approach.

The involvement of institutional investors in this funding round led the seed fund to rebrand itself as Prime Venture Partners. The seed fund felt its new name better reflected its institutional underpinnings.

“We are looking to partner closely with high quality entrepreneurs to bring disruptive world-class companies to market. They could be targeting India or global markets in the fintech, financial services, consumer internet, IoT, Aadhaar and healthcare sectors,” Amit Somani, managing partner at the VC, said in a statement earlier today.

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Prime Venture Partners’ portfolio includes startups like ZipDial, which was estimated to have been acquired by Twitter earlier this year for about US$30 million, Ezetap, and HackerEarth. Last month, the seed fund invested US$500,000 in marketing tech startup Vidgyor. Prime Venture Partners has disclosed investments of over US$1.5 million in early-stage tech startups since February.

Early-stage funding is hot property in India with VC funds, Blume Ventures and Unitus Seed Fund being some of the other notable competitors in the area. Mumbai-based, Blume Ventures, likes to take a holistic approach to building its portfolio by helping its startups to raise funding, and support their growth by finding more investors and angels to back them. Blume Ventures’ portfolio includes InMobi, babajob, and Explara and earlier this month the VC fund also invested in US$11 million in Roadrunnr.

Unitus Seed Fund is a Bangalore-based seed-stage investment fund with notable investments in the startups, LabInApp and Jiffstore.