Early-stage venture capital (VC) firm Gemba Capital has raised its maiden funds at Rs 75 crore.
The VC firm will use 50% of the funds in fintech and SaaS startups, while the remaining amount will be deployed in various startups including Web 3.0, gaming, deep tech, healthcare, and B2B commerce.
The firm had announced an opening fund of $10 million in September last year.
The Bangalore-based Gemba Capital was founded in 2018 by Adith Podhar, it invests in tech startups from India in seed and pre-seed rounds.
‘We are overwhelmed by the confidence shown in our abilities by our LPs (limited partners who are sponsors in funds). We have reached the target of Rs 75 crore and will announce the final close soon…. We want to close all the ongoing discussions and should get oversubscribed and touch Rs 100 crore”, said, Adith Podhar, founding partner at Gemba Capital.
“Our deal pipeline is strong, and we intend to make our first investment from May this year onwards. Our target remains to close eight deals by December end”, he added.
The Micro VC initially invests $100K-$250K in startups. It has reserved approximately 35% of the funds from its portfolio of companies to participate in the follow-on round of winners. Gemba Capital ‘s portfolio consists of pre-funds startups like Plum and Verak (insurtech); Inai, ClickPost, Zuper, Tranzact, Threado (SaaS); Smartstaff, Unnati, Krishikan (marketplace/aggregators), Wint, Strata and Grip (alternative investment).
About Gemba Capital
Guided by True North, they at Gemba Capital back tech-enabled startups that are scalable and looking for seed/angel funding. At Gemba Capital, they look for three things: Founder, Product, and Market. • Ability, passion, and vision in a founder. • Need, differentiation and value in a product. • Size, competition and growth in a market. They are sector agnostic, however below are their focus areas: Consumer tech – domestic demand SaaS – Cross border their ideal investment will be: They look to invest in visionary founders, strong in execution and with complementary skill sets with Significant growth potential over the next 3 to 5 years. Startups have paying customers.
They prefer backing founders with at least 4-5 years of prior experience Differentiated products or services that have the potential to be “platforms“ Products or services that solve a particular problem or cater to a particular need/gap in the market. They typically invest between INR 15 lakhs to INR 75 lakhs in one company. They prefer to co-invest along with other funds/angel investors They fund in the angel, bridge, and pre Series A rounds. They are open to investing through convertible structures and instruments, however, they prefer straight equity.
