Micro-VC fund iSeed closes second fund at $15 million

Micro-venture capital fund, iSeed on Thursday said it has closed $15 million as part of its second fund, iSeed II, in a bid to ramp up its investments in the Indian startup ecosystem.

Close to 60 limited partners (LPs) invested in iSeed’s second fund including- Prasanna Sankar, co-founder of employee management unicorn, Rippling; Lachy Groom, former executive of payments major, Stripe; Ankur Nagpal, founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of edtech startup, Teachable, amongst others.

Institutional investors including RTP Global, FJ Labs, Tribe Capital, Hummingbird, Kamco Jedi Fund also participated as a part of the fund raise.

Apart from AngelList founder Naval Ravikant, other big backers of iSeed include- Jack Herrick, founder and chief executive of wikihow; Bryce Maddock, co-founder and CEO of IPO-bound TaskUs.

iSeed’s first fund was anchored by Ravikant, and was launched in May last year, with a corpus of $5 million. So far, iSeed has made investments in close to 36 startups from its first fund, co-investing with institutional investors including Sequoia Capital India and Lightspeed India Partners, among others.

Some of the investments from iSeed’s first fund include - Pepper Content, FloBiz, Velocity, BimaPe, PagarBook, qoohoo, amongst others.

Through the second fund, iSeed now looks to invest in another 50 startups, participating with ticket sizes of $100,000 - $250,000, during seed stages. Through the new close, the micro venture capital (VC) firm may also look to make follow-on investment in its existing portfolio.

The micro-VC has already made two new investments from its second fund, so far.

“The startup ecosystem in India is maturing and investments have picked up pace, as more LPs are excited to invest in the Indian tech landscape. We exhausted the first fund sooner than our expectation and therefore decided to increase the fund size, this time around. iSeed II will allow us to double down our commitment towards Indian startups. However, we will continue to invest around the same ticket sizes,” said Utsav Somani, partner at iSeed and AngelList India, in an interaction with Mint.

Apart from initial investments, iSeed also looks to provide Indian founders with regular interactions, from its LP network and startup founders based in Silicon Valley. The fund also claims to bring mentorship opportunities for its portfolio from executives of Stripe, AngelList, Uber, Facebook, Google, among others.

Last year, the platform also launched its mentorship programme called ‘Knowledge Council’ to help its portfolio members get direct learning access with seasoned founders and technology executives. The Council included former head of LinkedIn India, Akshay Kothari; general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, Sriram Krishnan; and founder of Gumroad, Sahil Lavingia.

iSeed also launched a Southeast Asia fund, focused on the region in October, last year.