The Mumbai-based fund, which backs growth-stage companies, received as much as 60% of the capital commitments from domestic limited partners (LPs), with the rest coming from international investors. The LPs included institutional investors and family offices such as HDFC Fund of Funds, Small Industries Development Bank of India, DSP family office, Amansa Capital founder Akash Prakash and Dream Sports cofounder Harsh Jain.
Filter Capital will focus on leading and co-leading Series B and C rounds in the range of $15-20 million, Nitin Nayar, cofounder and managing director, told ET. “With these stages, we tend to mean that there is a stable team in place, there is a clear product-market fit and there are enough customers from whom you can extrapolate the size of the market,” he said. The firm will make four-six more investments from the fund.
Nayar launched Filter Capital in 2018 and Sumit Sinha joined him a year later. They both have had nearly two decades of experience in private equity investing and had worked together at Warburg Pincus. The duo began raising their first fund 2021 and made a first close of Rs 330 crore a year later.
Filter Capital India Fund I has so far invested about Rs 225 crore from its corpus in four entities — enterprise loyalty software provider Capillary Technologies, bus mobility platform Chalo Mobility, ecommerce logistics services firm LoadShare Networks and healthcare enterprise software company THB.
“We seek to partner with capable entrepreneurs whose businesses have reached an inflection point and are poised for rapid growth,” cofounder and managing partner Sinha said.
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Nayar said the firm expects about two-thirds of its investments to be deployed into software services-linked businesses. “Our investments are typically a five-year hold. Our view is that eventually these companies will start maturing and we can start returning capital to our investors. We can also start planning for our second fund, which I expect will be two-three years from now,” he added.In the past year, growth-stage tech investor Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India has announced the final close of its fifth fund at $541 million. B Capital closed its second Opportunities Fund at $750 million in March.
