On Wednesday, AWE Funds, an investment platform, announced that the first close of its maiden fund in India received commitments totaling USD 15 million.
The fund will promote gender equity and climate action as a unique strategy to get commercial returns for its investors, investing mainly in scalable innovation across the food and agriculture, healthcare, education, and fintech sectors.
AWE Funds said it “has secured USD 15 million in aggregate commitments and is targeting an overall fund of USD 45 million with a green-shoe option of an additional USD 15 million.”
Its ‘Achieving Women Entrepreneurs Early Growth Fund I’ is registered with SEBI.
“The fastest growing market and an under-appreciated resource, in most countries are women. By focusing on gender equity and climate action, which are very significantly and inextricably linked AWE Funds’ team is uniquely positioned to identify investment opportunities that deliver superior commercial returns to our investors while unlocking serious nation building impact returns,” AWE Funds, Founding Partner, Seema Chaturvedi said.
“Our investments unleash a virtuous economic value creation cycle that generates sustainable and scalable multi-generational prosperity. We are very grateful to our early investors who have supported us and invite others to join this movement,” she added.
The fund has secured investment support from high-net-worth individual investors and blue-chip international and India-based institutional investors.
The investors include Zia Mody (Founder- AZB & Partners), Soumya Rajan (Founder & CEO- Waterfield Advisors), Padma Chandrasekaran (formerly Gates Foundation), Divya Sampath (formerly Microsoft), Ajay Prabhu (former COO- Quest Global), Ramakrishnan Raman (Founder- aXYKno Capital), Vikas Chaturvedi (Founder- Valuecent), Sunil Srivastava (CEO- Ampera Life) and Simran Jindal (Executive Partner- IBM Consulting).
By 2030, AWE Funds aims to help 30 million women globally to gain agency.
