360 ONE Asset launches ₹500 crore early-stage fund to back startups

With cheque sizes ranging from ₹10–25 crore, the fund will aim for meaningful ownership in about 25 companies, focusing on areas such as domestic consumption, frontier technology, financial services infrastructure, and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI)-led services.

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“The stage that we will come at will be the first institutional round in a company that is beginning to see strong and early signs of a product market fit. With this fund, we aim to bridge the funding gap between the very early stages and the growth stage options that are available in the market," Abhishek Nag, strategy head of early-stage VC at 360 ONE Asset, told Mint in an interview.

While older venture capital funds have become larger and are targeting relatively later stages, the early-stage end of the spectrum now has a robust pool of micro venture capital firms, solo general partners (GPs), and angel investors issuing pre-seed cheques.

“Our focus is the stage in the middle where we hope to build a high conviction, concentrated portfolio of companies that have a reasonable product market fit with good fundamentals in place," Nag said, adding that the fund will also offer co-investment opportunities for strategic partners alongside leading rounds.

On sectoral focus, Nag said there are multiple strong tailwinds in consumption. “With the rise of GenZ and mass affluent and per capita income increasing, discretionary spends are also on the rise. There is scope for multiple global consumer brands that can come from India."

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“We are also spending a lot of time understanding defence, space, semiconductor and precision manufacturing industries. There is also a lot to do in building strong global supply chains," Nag said. Other sectors such as financial services remain underpenetrated, while GenAI-led services are expected to disrupt traditional services companies, he added.

The fund has already made four investments across sectors such as gaming, consumer, SaaS, and space-tech, though it did not disclose specific names.

360 ONE Asset, which manages more than $3 billion in assets across its venture capital and private equity platform, has launched several other funds in recent months, including a ₹5,000 crore secondaries fund, a pre-IPO fund, a healthcare-focused private equity fund, and sector-specific funds targeting financial services and technology. It also expects to launch a consumer-focused fund soon.

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“We have launched these funds as we believe there is a lot of depth in the kind of opportunities we are seeing today. There is immense scope for good returns as exit strategies evolve for new-age companies. We also have the ability to offer expertise, and another way to think about the depth in the market is to have the right size of funds chasing those companies," Nag said, adding that the firm can support startups from the idea stage all the way to IPO.