Next stop for Athera Venture Partners: General Partners

Bengaluru: Athera Venture Partners (formerly Inventus India), a Bengaluru-based venture capital firm with its fourth fund (launched in 2023), has recently focused on Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) as part of its venture. promote new technologies.

“GenAI… we are watching everything closely, but we are proceeding very carefully. We have made one small investment in a company called Hyperbots, which uses GenAI to streamline the accounts payable process,” said Samir Kumar, one of the four general partners managing Athera. DH.

Pointing out that it has been 5-6 years since the company began raising funds for emerging technologies, such as its investment in space technology company Pixxel, he added: “We have also done and will continue to do so for hardware and software companies where the intelligence lies in software, like Euler Motors, Ati Motors and BluArmor.”

But a company that has focused on technology from the very beginning, whether in the business to client or business to business sphere, from the very beginning GenAI has been a bus not to be missed.

“We believe there will be many different specialized applications of GenAI in the enterprise space. One of the decisions we made for our company was that we would not do large language models (LLM), for example. We will not try to compete with Open AI, ChatGPT, Gemini or Metas. We believe that these are capital-intensive investments and not suitable for a fund such as ours. What we will do is probably vertical applications of LLM, such as those that have been trained on certain domain-specific functions to become more efficient,” Kumar explained.

The company, which started as Inventus India in 2008, has so far launched four funds. Inventus Capital Partners (Mauritius) Ltd was founded in 2008 with a fund size of Rs 146 crore. In 2013, Inventus Capital Partners Il Ltd had a fund size of Rs 323.5 crore.

Next in 2018 was Inventus IlI India Fund with a corpus of Rs 360.8 crore. It is currently in the process of setting up its fourth fund – Athera Fund IV – in which it has already made four investments and is close to completing its fifth – a re-emerging technology company based in Bengaluru.

“It’s building intelligent vision that allows robotic arms to do things they couldn’t do before. Final documentation and announcement should be completed within the next week or two. We are infusing around Rs 17 crores in the round which will be around Rs 75-80 crores. We’re leading the round. Current investors are investing some money. We also have some new investors who are running this venture with us,” Kumar added.

The company is currently in the process of issuing its sixth term sheet for a company in the B2C space, which is expected to happen in about a week. “We intend to create a portfolio of around 16-20 companies, so we constitute almost one-third of the portfolio built,” Kumar said.

While the company does not currently anticipate any profitable exits in the near future, it is involved in ongoing financing rounds at its portfolio companies.

“Clootrack closed around last year. Vunet is in the process of closing a Rs 60-crore round. Tricog closes the round. Ati Motors will raise the round and close it soon. One of the four companies in our fund, Terra, is eligible to raise funds in a growth round less than a year after our investment. MoveInSync will be made public in the next 18-24 months,” he calculated.

Reacting to the recently launched Bharat Startup Knowledge Access Registry (BHASKAR), which aims to connect startups and potential investors, Parag Dhol, the other general partner of Athera interviewed by DH, noted: “The regulatory burden in the country seems to be are declining while the industry is growing, which is not good for the industry or the country. We hope that some of these initiatives will move in this direction.”

On the other hand, Kumar assured: “Smart entrepreneurs will find a way to reach out to investors. Good investors will find a way to reach entrepreneurs. To bring them together, the government doesn’t have to play any role.”

He is also not very happy with the Securities and Exchange Board of India’s (Sebi) increasing regulations binding alternative investment funds (AIFs).

“The AIF regulations came into force in 2012–2013. It was a well-developed set of regulations, and the AIF industry grew from there. But they can stop interfering with these regulations. They are coming up with more and more things that I think are making life difficult for AIFs in terms of compliance burdens and regulatory burdens,” Kumar said.

Regional balance in the history of a start-up

Asked if Delhi is stealing a march over Bengaluru when it comes to startups going for floating IPOs, Dhol pointed out that Bengaluru is also the turn of Ola Electric and the upcoming Swiggy offering.

If Delhi has performed well in the B2C segment, it is not as strong in software as a service (SaaS), deep technologies and hardware-software combinations. “When it comes to new technologies, I think Bangalore will be the leader,” he noted.

He also saw other cities finding their niche in different segments like Chennai in Saas and Hyderabad in space. “Now that technology is entering every aspect of our lives, some of these cities will stand out with specific features,” he added.