Inventus India launches $120m fund, rebrands to Athera Venture Partners

Early-stage VC firm Inventus India has announced the launch of a new fund with a target corpus of 9 billion rupees (US$120 million). The company has also rebranded itself as Athera Venture Partners.

Athera Venture Partners team / Photo credit: Athera

With Fund IV, Athera said it will invest in up to 20 pre-series A and series A tech startups across emerging tech verticals such as IoT, SaaS, enterprise software, fintech, and Web3. It will begin deploying the fund in the next three months.

Typical check sizes of its investments will be between US$640,000 and US$5 million. The VC firm will also back future rounds of its portfolio for the fund.

“With our new fundraise, we wish to literally triple down on the startup ecosystem in India that is on a bullish growth trajectory,” Rutvik Doshi, general partner at Athera, said in a statement.

Athera started its investment journey in 2008 with its first fund worth US$51 million, through which it invested in 18 companies. The deployment of its second fund, which saw US$106 million in dedicated capital, began in 2013 and saw investments in 24 startups, the firm told Tech in Asia.

The first two iterations were cross-border funds, which means the VC firm invested in both US and Indian companies. The third fund, however, exclusively focused on the Indian startup ecosystem.

It began investing from the third fund, which was US$47.5 million in size, in 2018. So far, the fund has invested in 12 startups.

Athera’s current portfolio consists of 23 firms, including Euler Motors, PlayShifu, Pixxel, HealthifyMe, Tricog, and MoveInSync.

It has also backed PolicyBazaar, which went public last year, and redBus, which was acquired by Naspers. The VC firm exited from redBus in 2013 and made partial exits in PolicyBazaar in 2019 and 2021.

See also: Exclusive: Indian spacetech firm eyes $25m series A raise for liftoff

Athera’s new fund comes as investments in the Indian startup ecosystem is dwindling amid concerns about the downturn.

Indian startups reportedly raised US$1.6 billion in April, which is nearly half of what they raised in the same month last year. While the creation of unicorns has slowed down, some startups have also resorted to layoffs.

The VC firm, however, is unperturbed by the gloomy outlook.