Sistema Asia Fund to Expand its 1st Fund to $120 Mn for Doubling its Indian Startup Investments

Sistema Asia Fund (SAF), a proprietary venture capital fund of Russian conglomerate Sistema JSFC, is in the process of expanding its first fund to $120 million in order to double down its investments in Indian startups, reported Samreen Ahmad of Business Standard.
The VC fund will invest $40 million from its own while the other $80 million will raised from external investors, including limited partners and high networth individuals (HNIs) for which the company is already in talks with several HNIs and institutions in India.
The VC Fund however is keeping up with a greenshoe option for going up to $150 million for this fund if there’s an added interest from external investors.
“Seeing how our company’s portfolio has shaped up, Sistema has decided to double down on its investment in India. We are also going to broad base our fund, so it just won’t be a single LP fund,” Sumit Jain, senior partner, Sistema Asia Fund Advisory said in a statement.
An alumnus of IIM Calcutta and IIT Kharagpur, Sumit Jain is a seasoned investment banking and VC veteran who has just joined Sistema few days back. Earlier, Sumit was serving in Kalaari Capital.
SAF, which will announce the first close of the fund expansion in the next few weeks, will use some of the top-up capital to invest in its existing portfolio companies apart from making new investments, post fund expansion.
Existing portfolio companies of SAF a diverse range of startups in India, include online meat seller Licious, internet kitchen brand Faasos, health and fitness app HealthifyMe, online pharmacy marketplace NetMeds, and lending startup Lendingkart.
The complete closure of the fund is expected by early next year.
Established by Sistema in 2015, SAF was established in Singapore and invests in mid-stage (Series B and later investment rounds) high-tech companies in India and Southeast Asia that work in the B2C and B2B segments and have stable sources of revenue and potential to go global.
The fund’s industry focus is consumer tech (e-commerce, healthcare, transport, media, finance and education) and enterprise tech (IoT, VR/AR, platform solutions, big data, AI and machine learning).
Source: IndianWeb2
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