Nandan Nilekani and Helion's Sanjeev Agarwal launch $100 mn Fundamentum partnership

Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani and Helion's Sanjeev Aggarwal have announced a $100-million fund to invest in startups and back entrepreneurs. The aim? They want to build companies that can scale into next-gen, billion-dollar enterprises.

They are calling this platform,  The Fundamentum Partnership. The investment corpus may grow to $200 million, if and as institutional investors bring in the future monies.

Livemint reported that Nilekani's new venture capital fund had already raised about $50 million of the total corpus, with the remaining half expected to be closed over the next few months. Nilekani and Aggarwal together are contributing roughly a third of the fund, or about $30-35 million.

THE BIG PICTURE

Will look at investments in the range of $10-25 million.

May double corpus $200 million if institutional investors step in

Want to help founders in building scalable technology

Focus on startups in consumer technology businesses, enterprise technology/outsourcing companies serving global corporations.

Nilekani said the decision to launch the new fund was triggered by the need to create more long-term and sustainable businesses such as Infosys, Wipro Ltd, Bharti Airtel Ltd and Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd.

Nilekani has been investing in personal capacity so far. His investments have been in startups like ShopX, RailYatri, angel investment platform LetsVenture, Sedemac etc. He will, however, now stop investing in a personal capacity.

“I have thoroughly enjoyed looking at how Indian entrepreneurs identify original Indian problems and then solve these with application of technology. At Fundamentum, we are committed to building companies to last, with speed and at scale,” Nilekani said in the statement.