Unitus Seed Fund, which is a Seed stage impact investor, has been successful in raising an astonishing sum of $7 million in a fresh round of funding from a cluster of individual and institutional investors. This fresh funding of $7 million has taken the total fund tally to $20 million.
Micro VC fund got its funding from many United States based foundations which included Wadhwani Foundation, Deshpande Foundation, Sorenson Impact Foundation, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, and Lemelson Foundation. The new Individual investor members include Concur CEO Steve Singh, Amazon Executive Diego Piacentini, McKinsey executive Dilip Wagle, Microsoft executive Soma Somasegar, Nagesh Pabbisetty, Bharat Shah and Anoop Gupta, Lance Fors, financial services executive Geeta Iyer and Social Ventures Partners leaders Todd Vogel and others.
"We plan to invest in upto 40 startups over the next two years that impacts the lives of low income population. There is a dearth of seed capital in this segment of the market, making the investment opportunities very attractive. We invest anywhere between Rs 50 lakhs and Rs 1 crore in startups and pick up a significant minority stake" said Srikrishna Ramamoorthy, who is a partner in Unitus Seed fund, in a statement to The Times of India. He further added that the fund has plans of raising a sum of $5 million from India based investors over the period of couple of months.
Earlier Unitus Seed Fund announced that it will invest in 30 Gujarat based startups
Unitus Seed Fund has already invested in 13 startups which include mGaadi, which is a mobile solution for hailing auto rickshaws, Hippocampus Learning Centre, which provides pre-school and after school tutoring programs for children, Addresshealth, which is a paediatric healthcare centre and Caravan Craft, which is selling contemporary merchandise made by traditional Indian artists.
Most recent investment of Unitus in India is Jiffstore - a Bangalore-based m-commerce platform for grocery retailers.
According to Dave Richards, who is the co-founder and Managing Partner of Unitus, the fund believes that there is a great opportunity to be able to invest in a whole new generation of budding entrepreneurs who are working towards building disruptive new businesses which serve the low-income market of India.
The fund has also successfully launched a programme which aims to accelerate early-stage startups targeting low income groups in India.
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