NEW DELHI: Venture Catalysts, a startup incubator, on Thursday announced the launch of India’s first-ever dedicated growth capital fintech fund--Beams FinTech Fund (Beams)--which will invest in fintech companies operating at the confluence of financial services and technology space.
Beams proposes to invest $8 million to $10 million in growth stages, Series B and Series C rounds of fintech companies led by high-quality founders. It has a target size of $100 million and a greenshoe option. “It (Beams) plans to build a concentrated portfolio of a dozen fintech companies in a market currently valued at $75 billion and is likely to touch $200+ billion by 2025," the incubator said in its statement.
Venture Catalysts claims to have nine unicorns and a $100 million early-stage sector-agnostic accelerator fund in its stable.
Beams is co-founded by Sagar Agarvwal, Dr. Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, Anuj Golecha, Anil Jain and Gaurav Jain. Naveen Surya, chairman of the Fintech Convergence Council and Founder of ItzCash (now EbixInc), is the fintech expert partner (non-executive) as part of the core founding team.
"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 & 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, co-founder and partner, Beams.
Beams said it will provide a network of local and international banks, insurance companies, NBFCs, fintechs, mentors and advisors to not only access capital at affordable rates but also to expedite the go-to-market strategy of its portfolio companies in India and abroad.
The founding team is in advanced stages of its first close and making a couple of investments, Venture Catalysts said in its statement.
