India's first venture fund by startup founders launched with $85 mn corpus

The men behind the fund are Girish Mathrubootham of Freshworks, Manav Garg of Eka Software, Shubham Gupta (ex-Matrix) and Avinash Raghava (ex-Accel)

In a push to entrepreneurial zeal within India, founders Girish Mathrubootham of Freshworks, Manav Garg of Eka Software, Shubham Gupta ex-Matrix and Avinash Raghava ex-Accel have come together to launch a founders-first venture called Together Fund.

The fund, which has an initial corpus of $85 million, seeks to help India’s best SaaS entrepreneurs build, scale and win together, establishing India as a true product nation. Together Fund is the first and only VC fund in India that is led by founders. In parallel with being founding partners of Together, they run some of India’s most well-known SaaS startups.

The fund will invest from $250,000 up to $3 million in a seed, pre-A or Series A round. The founders typically like to be the first institutional investor so that they can do the heavy lifting in terms of helping entrepreneurs build the product and achieve product-market-fit for the crucial zero to one part of the startup journey.

Other than their time and expertise, the Together Fund will offer an ecosystem of over 150 operators, who can help startups with operational expertise, making connections and tactical contextual advice. Additionally, they will also be helping companies in getting better partner deals from vendors and open access to the best CEO coaches.

While announcing the launch of the fund Mathrubootham in a blog said: “Freshworks is a large company with more than 3,800 team members and offices all over the world. But almost eleven years ago, we were just a six-member team operating out of a small garage in Chennai. I didn’t have a gilt-edged resume or family wealth but that never stopped me from dreaming big.”

He further added, “I realize that not every founder is as fortunate, which is why I have backed more than sixty startups as an angel investor. While many of these startups prospered and grew into marquee names, what gave me the most satisfaction was seeing underrated founders morph into ambitious individuals, confident of their place in this world.”

Explaining the idea behind Together, Manav Garg of Eka Software wrote: “Your relationship with Together shouldn’t just be like having an investor in your company - it will be like having an additional co-founder. Sticking with you through thick and thin. The kind of investors that we dreamed of partnering with when we started our own startup journeys.”

Some of the limited partners for the fund include, Ritesh Arora of BrowserStack, Kunal Shah of CRED, Aneesh Reddy of Capillary and Garuav Munjal from Unacademy.