Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of IT giant Infosys, has raised funds in the tune of $20 Mn from CDPQ (a Canada-based institutional investment firm) for its dedicated startup growth fund known as “fundamental partnership – fund I.”
Fundamentum Partnership is reportedly targeting total corpus of $100 Mn and CDPQ’s contribution of $20 Mn will be apparently part of this fund. The corpus is targeting an average investment ticket of $15 Mn in promising startups, with special focus on consumer and enterprise technology businesses spread across wide range of businesses. Fundamentum will look to leverage its financial and intellectual expertise to propel these businesses towards profitability.
Speaking on the investment, Nilekani said “we are pleased to welcome CDPQ to the Fundamentum platform. We will greatly benefit from CDPQ’s knowledge of global trends and deep investment expertise.”
Fundamentum till date has invested in several highly promising startups. Some of the companies in its portfolio include big e-commerce names like BigBasket and Shopclues as well as other emerging startups like power2SME and RailYatri.
It is also worth noting that Nandan Nilekani has invested in multitude of Indian startups in personal capacities as well. Nilekani along with other well-known entrepreneurs like Ratan Tata, Ronnie screwvala and Anand Mahindra have continuously reposed their faith in the Indian startup story by investing in startups in personal capacities or through corpus funds.
Fundamental partnership has to compete with other well-known VC firms like Nexus Venture Partners, Accel Partners, Blume Ventures, Tiger Global, Matrix Partners and Kalaari Capital. While the presence of so many VC firms has most certainly given a huge boost to Indian startup ecosystem, it is hard to ignore the fact that the on-going funding drought has hit the Indian startups really hard.
Experts claim that on-going funding drought is a reflection of the fact that Indian startups are going through consolidation phase and only those startups with good balance sheets will be able to survive this phase.