Venture Catalysts floats new fund to focus on growth-stage fintech investments

Bengaluru: Startup incubator, Venture Catalysts has floated its second fund, Beams Fintech Fund (Beams) to focus on growth stage investments in the financial technology space, it said in a prepared statement on Thursday.

With a target size of $100 million, Beams will look to invest $8 million-$10 million in growth-stage funding rounds of Indian fintech companies and plans to invest across a dozen fintech startups. The fund is in the advanced stages to make its first close.

Beams is the first sector-focused growth capital fund by Venture Catalysts and second fund from their platform after 9 Unicorns Accelerator Fund.

The founding members of the fund include – Nimai Capital’s managing director, Sagar Agarvwal; fintech angel investor, Anuj Golecha; as well as Venture Catalysts’ co-founders, Dr. Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, Anil Jain and Gaurav Jain.

The fund has also roped in chairman of the fintech convergence Council and ItzCash founder Naveen Surya, as an expert partner to the core founding team.

Apart from investments, Beams also looks to help fintechs with partnership opportunities across local and international banks, insurance companies, as well as non-banking finance companies. It also looks to provide its portfolio with regular access to mentors as well as advisors.

“Fintech is consuming an increasingly larger slice of the software pie. We are in fintech 3.0 right now in India, with the first wave of lending and payments companies having received a significant amount of capital and now the capital is moving across segments. Seasoned professionals and high-quality founders are moving out from larger firms to target newer categories to solve the long tail financial services demand in India,” said Sagar Agarvwal, cofounder and Partner, Beams.

Globally, there are several funds including Ribbit Capital, General Catalysts and Insight Partners, which are sharpening their focus towards the Indian fintech opportunity.

“Fintech opportunity is huge in India as it is the only tech segment in India that has created over $75 billion in value and $8 billion in M&A (mergers and acquisitions). Our returns in BharatPe are a testament to the opportunity in the Fintech space in India. We have given 90x return to investors from BharatPe exit which turned unicorn last year and are creating more Unicorns in this space,” said Anuj Golecha, cofounder & partner, Beams.

In 2021, close to nine Indian fintech companies turned unicorn including the likes of Digit, Acko, Cred, BharatPe, Groww, Zeta, and Slice among others. A unicorn is a privately held startup with a valuation of $1 billion or above.

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