Gemba Capital launches its second fund of ₹250 crore to invest in platform-first businesses over the next 3 years

Micro VC firm Gemba Capital, which has invested in Plum (Insurtech), Grip Invest, Wint Wealth, Strata, among others has launched its second fund with a corpus of ₹250 crore, including a green shoe option of ₹50 crore.

Fund-II will invest in 30 early-stage ‘Platform-first’ businesses across 3 focus sectors – fintech, consumer tech and B2B platforms with first cheque of ₹5 crore and 30 per cent reserve ratio for making follow-on investments.

Digital “Platform-first” businesses are those which can create compounding moats through ecosystem creation, network effects or ability to stack value add layers.

Founded in 2018, its Fund I of ₹70 crore is 2022 with an average cheque size of ₹2 crore. Fund I was raised through investments from family offices, founders and CXOs.

Since inception, Gemba Capital has been consistent in its strategy of investing only is pre-seed/seed rounds across focus sectors, investing in less than 10 deals a year and focusing on value addition in the portfolio companies. The firm has developed a proprietary ‘Founder Market Fit Framework’ that assists in identifying the right teams to back.

“Our journey has evolved from investing proprietary capital to running an angel syndicate and then raising and investing from our ₹70 crore Fund-I. We are now looking to partner with institutional LPs for our ₹250 crore Fund-II. The Indian early-stage startup ecosystem needs more institutional capital to be deployed through Single-Stage VC funds like us,” said Adith Podhar, General Partner, Gemba Capital.

Gemba Capital has backed over 120 founders over 50 startups in fintech, consumer tech and B2B Platforms since its inception.

Some of the notable portfolio companies are Plum (Insurtech), Grip Invest, Wint Wealth, Strata, Navadhan, Zuper, Showroom, Smartstaff, ClickPost and LightFury.

Related Topics