Pentathlon Ventures launches Rs 450 crore fund II, to invest in B2B SaaS startups

The fund aims to invest in 25 B2B SaaS start-ups and is planning to make the final close within the next 12 months.

Early-stage venture capital firm Pentathlon Ventures on September 5 launched its second fund with a total corpus of Rs 450 crore, and plans to invest in Business-to-Business (B2B) Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) firms, in what is the latest instance of a VC firm raising money amid a tough macro environment.

The fund aims to invest in 25 B2B SaaS start-ups and is planning to make the final close within the next 12 months.

"We always believed in the B2B story...The picture has become very clear that B2B is performing really well. In B2C there is a lot of marketing spends and at the end of the day it is winner-take-all. We are very glad that we decided to go with this thesis," Said Pentathlon Ventures’ Managing Partner Gireendra Kasmalkar to Moneycontrol.

Within the SaaS ecosystem, Pentathlon Ventures plans to support solutions across Enterprise Digital Transformation, E-commerce Enablement, Fintech, Vertical SaaS, Applied AI, Sustainable Tech, and HealthTech.

For Fund II, Pentathlon Ventures is raising capital from a mix of domestic and global limited partners encompassing successful business leaders, corporations and institutions.

"We will be investing in newer B2B SaaS companies through Fund II and we see there are more nuanced AI companies coming today...Our cheque sizes will be in the range of $750K to $1.5 million in seed stages," Said Sandeep Chawda, Managing Partner.

The company is also looking to invest in a few startups that are working on Generative Artificial Intelligence, Kasmalkar said.

"We have always invested in AI, however generative AI has become very popular now. We have the tech background ourselves and we are seeing companies that uses AI in specific business like radiology, edtech and more are doing exceptional work...We will invest based on the disruptive use-cases," He added.

It's the first fund that was closed at Rs 76 crore and the VC firm has invested in 23 start-ups. Some of the fund’s portfolio companies include Deeptek, Rezolve, Spyne, Dista,  TurboHire and ShopSe, among others.