Speciale Invest, a seed-stage Venture Capital investment firm, closed of its second fund, the Speciale Invest Continuity Fund I, securing Rupees 286 Cr for the fund.
Founded in 2017 by Vishesh Rajaram and Arjun Rao, Speciale Invest invests in founders building deep tech or global SaaS startups. Before this fund, the investment firm had invested a total of INR 60 Cr across 18 tech startups in 2018.
The Speciale Invest Continuity Fund I was announced in April 2021, with an initial aim of INR 100 Cr as the fund’s corpus. However, the fund quickly oversubscribed to INR 140 Cr, and currently, Speciale Invest has a total corpus of INR 286 Cr in the SICF I.
Speciale Invest Continuity Fund 1 to focus on investing in enterprise software products
The fund’s focuses on enterprise software products (emerging from deep tech in cloud, voice & vision ML/AI, image analytics, AR/VR ) and industrial hardware products (emerging from deep tech in propulsion tech, robotics, rocket engines, lithium tech, micro-electronics, optical communication tech).
Up to now, Speciale Invest has backed startups such as Agnikul, The ePlane Company, CynLr, Qnu Labs, GalaxEye Space, Wingman, StreamAlive, Airboxr, Trainn, and Uravu Labs, among others.
The Speciale Invest Continuity Fund I will have a corpus of INR 286 Cr, with an initial aim to target more than 20 startups and provide them with Pre-Seed and seed funding.
Speciale will look at deeptech, dev tools, and global SaaS companies during the funding, and will also look for, in a limited capacity, to invest in the companies it is already a part of.
Noting the average ticket size, Rajaram told us that it will be around $500K or less. The firm will spread the investment across a period of four to five years, averaging 4-6 investments each year.
Speciale is always willing to underwrite a great amount of risk, and given that it is one of the earliest investors, it has rewarding equity holdings to take care of the risk, justifying the size of the investment.
