Micro VC AJVC Raises Rs 100 Cr Corpus To Back Early-Stage Startups

Aviral Bhatnagar’s A Junior VC (AJVC) has raised its first Rs 100 crore fund to focus on pre-seed investments in India, a stage he feels is still underdeveloped in the country’s growing startup ecosystem. 

Bhatnagar, who previously worked as an investor at early-stage firm Venture Highway, left just before Silicon Valley-based General Catalyst acquired the firm in June 2024. 

He plans to invest in 12-15 companies at the pre-seed stage each year, particularly in emerging sectors like artificial intelligence (AI), SaaS (software-as-a-service), and consumer technology.

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“We are seriously considering exercising the greenshoe option given the overwhelming interest in the fund,” Bhatnagar said.

“Our tech-driven systems and workflows allow us to respond to all our companies. Our turnaround time is publicly available due to a proprietary process and models we have created for our investments,” he said.

“A lot of funds that started out in 2022 or 2023 are in negative territory (in terms of returns) right now because they invested at high valuations… I think for us the good thing has been that valuations have been reset to a very large extent,” Bhatnagar said. “The deals we’re seeing at our stage…they could have raised three-four times larger rounds two years ago given how much funds were deploying. We are very disciplined with valuations and we have standard cheques.”

He explained that AJVC typically invests Rs 1.5 crore for a 9% stake in each startup.

The fund mainly consists of domestic capital and includes Indian family offices, founders of Indian tech unicorns and senior executives from major investment firms as its limited partners.

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