Gurgaon-based early stage venture capital fund, YourNest Angel Fund is gearing up to launch its second fund after having deployed a majority of its Rs 90 crore ($13.5 million) first fund.
“This fund is kind of fully deployed with 16 companies in the portfolio. We had planned for 12-18 companies when we conceptualised. We would now like to conserve the money we have in this period (before the second fund) for the follow on investments in the current businesses,” Sunil K Goyal, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, YourNest Angel Fund told DEALSTREETASIA.
Founded in 2011 by Sunil K Goyal, Sanjay Pande and Girish Shivani, YourNest has invested in start-ups like mycity4kids.com, Proof of Performance, Uniphore Software, arya.ai, golflan.com and bookmycab.com, which was recently acquired by Wings Travels.
While refraining from giving a specific time frame by when he expects the second fund to be in place, Goyal said there would be clarity on the fund in the next few months. However, he said it was highly likely that the 17th investment that would be made by YourNest would be done through warehousing, which is a process that allows venture capital firms to invest in startups even when they have exhausted their funds or are yet to raise a new fund.
“We have started learning from our investors as to what they are looking for, which is an exercise that we started around six months ago,” Goyal said adding that they had received a lot of interest from new investors as well.
“The key difference in the next fund would be that the people who themselves were angel investors now will be investors in venture capital. In the earlier fund they were a no-no, none of the angel investors, who wanted to invest directly in a startup wanted to invest in a venture capital. That is a change that we are seeing,” he said.
Recently,Mumbai-based early-stage investment firm Kae Capital raised $30 million from existing and new investors for its second fund, after it exhausted its maiden $25 million fund in March 2012. Another India-focussed early stage investor DSG Consumer Partners also recently hit the first close of its second fund at $35 million
Goyal said the plan for the next stage was still at a very preliminary stage to comment on the possible size of the second fund.
“We feel even if its a Rs 100 crore size, what we have currently done we will be able to achieve and consistently manage, anything above that will allow us to do a little bit more,” he said adding, “I’ve done 16 companies in the first fund, if the size of the second fund is bigger then we may be able to do 20-25 companies, but I have no idea how big it will be.”
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