Early-stage venture fund pi Ventures, which backs AI and deeptech startups, has received commitments of INR 100 Cr or 15% of the corpus from the SIDBI-managed Fund of Funds for Startups (FFS).
With the funds, pi Ventures plans to back Seed, Pre-Series A, and Series A startups working in the AI and deeptech domains. It has invested in seven startups, including Silence Laboratories in Singapore, Ottonomy.IO in the US, India’s ImmunitoAI, and Preimage.
The development comes after pi Ventures received INR 22 Cr from Belgium’s Colruyt Group in the last week of March 2023.
Manish Singhal founded pi Ventures in 2016, and in 2018 it closed its INR 225 Cr first fund (Fund I). With the first fund, it backed 15 deeptech startups, including Niramai, Pixis, Wysa, Agnikul, and Locus, to name a few.
It rolled out its second fund in March 2021 with a corpus of $90 million and a greenshoe option to a target of $100 million.
“We are delighted to welcome FFS again in our second fund. The confidence in our team and our investment strategy reinforces our commitment to support talented entrepreneurs who are creating disruptive products that solve fundamental real-world problems with innovative technology backed solutions,” said Manish Singhal, founding partner of pi Ventures.
The FFS of the Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) was founded in January 2016. The FFS has a corpus of INR 10,000 Cr and is expected to close in the second quarter of 2023 with a corpus of between INR 675 Cr and INR 750 Cr.
The FFS fund is backed by BII, Nippon India Digital Innovation AIF, Accel, Colruyt, Binny Bansal, Varun Alagh, Samit Shetty, Rajesh Ranavat, Anupam Mittal, Hemendra Kothari, Hitesh Oberoi, Ullas Kamath, Deep Kalra, and senior leaders from IBM, Facebook, and Google, among others.
