Speciale Invest announces first close of Growth Fund I

Early-stage venture capital investment firm Speciale Invest has announced the first close of Speciale Invest Growth Fund I at Rs 100 crore. Focused on deep science and enterprise technologies, it will close the raise at Rs 200 crore in 2023.

The fund will co-invest in follow-on rounds of select portfolio companies looking to raise additional capital in the Series A-plus stage, said Vishesh Rajaram, Managing Partner at Speciale Invest. 

“The LPs (Limited Partners or investors in a fund) are not remarkably different from our other funds but we have a number of large business houses who can help our portfolio companies with know-how,” Rajaram told YourStory.

He added that the fund will write cheques of up to $2 million as part of follow-on rounds in Speciale Invest’s existing portfolio of companies. “The fund is meant only for our winning companies and we will not lead the round. The fund is not meant for bridge rounds in our companies. We will look at metrics such as how the companies are tracking, customer adoption, etc,” he said. 

Founded in 2017 by Vishesh Rajaram and Arjun Rao, Speciale Invest launched its Rs 60 crore Fund I in 2018 with an average deal size of $500,000 and has already scored five early exits. The firm announced its Rs 286 crore Fund II in April 2022 and has deployed nearly 25% of the fund, with a target of backing nearly 20 to 22 startups in the pre-seed and seed stage. 

“The Growth Fund will invest in enterprise technology companies working in the field of AI, cloud, data, security and expanding the enterprise use case,” said Arjun Rao, General Partner at Speciale Invest. 

Speciale Invest has backed the likes of electric vehicle maker Ultraviolette Automotive Pvt Ltd, spacetech company AgnikulCosmos, IIT Madras incubated electric air transportation startup The ePlane Company , visual objects intelligence platform CynLr and others. The fund focuses on emerging technology companies including space tech, green hydrogen, robotics, batteries, quantum tech, AI-led SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), dev tools, data infrastructure and large language model applications, among others.