Venture capital firm Speciale Invest is launching a new investment vehicle that will focus on Series A and later-stage rounds, thereby marking a strategic shift from its long-standing emphasis on pre-seed and seed-stage investments. The deep-tech-focused firm is targeting a corpus of Rs 1,400 crore for this vehicle.
Under the new strategy, Speciale Invest will write cheques ranging between $5 million and $8 million. Additionally, the firm will allocate nearly 30%–40% of the total corpus toward follow-on investments.
According to Vishesh Rajaram, Managing Partner at Speciale Invest, the firm launched this vehicle to address the growing shortage of growth-stage capital in a rapidly expanding sector. “We have discovered that deep-tech is not an experiment. It is becoming mainstream,” he said.
Furthermore, Rajaram explained that increasing sector visibility will naturally draw more investors. “As the sector gains prominence, more investors will come and invest in the sector, which is good for the sector. Our most educated guess is that many of them will invest small amounts of money very early. Therefore, more companies will get started, and more companies will have deep tech capital. Our belief is that many of these companies will also need growth capital support. Given that this segment is now taking off, growth capital support may not be adequately available. And this is something that we relate to quite heavily among the 30+ companies that we have invested in across the last eight years,” he added.
Meanwhile, the announcement comes at a time when investor attention toward deep-tech is rising even as growth-stage funding into the sector continues to thin.
Notably, this development follows Speciale Invest’s recent close of its Rs 600 crore Fund III, which doubled the size of its previous fund. Over the past eight years, the firm has built a strong track record in deep tech and has acted as the first institutional investor in companies such as Agnikul Cosmos and Metastable Materials.
To support the new phase of investments, Speciale Invest has promoted Venture Partner Vijay Jacob to the role of General Partner—Growth.
Importantly, Jacob clarified that the firm will retain its sectoral focus. “There is no change in the sectors that we’ll be looking at,” he said. Speciale Invest will continue backing startups across space-tech, energy, artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, and biosciences. “The key insight is that technical difficulty that translates into a competitive advantage is something that does not change when we move from seed-stage to growth-stage,” he noted.
Going forward, the firm expects the new vehicle’s portfolio to include both existing portfolio companies and fresh investments. “We will look to invest in the best companies, whether it’s part of our portfolio or not,” Jacob said.
In addition, the shift toward later-stage investments is likely to draw stronger interest from institutional investors as limited partners. Rajaram pointed out that because the fund will support Series A and later-stage companies where technology risks are largely addressed, institutional capital is expected to engage more actively.
Finally, General Partner Arjun Rao stated that the firm is closely tracking emerging opportunities in quantum energy, defence technology, and semiconductors.
