Speciale Invest announces its second funds closure at Rs 286 crore

Speciale Invest, a seed-stage VC investing in deep science and enterprise technologies, announced its second fund’s final closure at Rs 286 crore. The second fund has been oversubscribed twice the amount announced during the fund’s launch, which was Rs 140 crore.

In April 2021, the company had announced their second fund to be a corpus of around Rs 100 crore, but this got oversubscribed to over Rs 140 crore.

Vishesh Rajaram, Managing Partner at Speciale Invest, said, “The oversubscribed closure of our second fund reaffirms the opportunity ahead for DeepTech in India and our commitment towards working with entrepreneurs to solve hard technology problems for the world from India!”

The fund, which has backed startups such as Agnikul, The ePlane Company, CynLr, Qnu Labs, GalaxEye Space, Wingman, StreamAlive, Airboxr, Trainn, Uravu Labs, among others, will look to invest in 20+ early-stage startups through pre-seed and seed rounds with the average cheque sizes ranging from $100,000 to $1 million.

“As we move forward, we take the learnings and progress from our previous and existing fund portfolio as motivation and will continue to partner with early-stage founders who have unique and deep insights into their vision and have products and tech that will make the world simpler and better,” said Arjun Rao, General Partner at Speciale Invest.

Speciale invests in start-ups building enterprise software products including SaaS, Developers tools and frontier technologies including Climate, Advanced Materials, Space Tech, Robotics, Photonics, Alternative Energy, to name a few.

Speciale had raised its first fund in 2018 and invested in 18 startups so far, with an average deal size of sub $0.5 million. This second fund has nearly grown 4x in capital commitments of its predecessor fund. The investment strategy and portfolio construct remain similar across funds. A larger corpus allows for more follow-on allocation and the opportunity to double down on the winners within the portfolio.