Endiya Partners closes Rs 500 crore second fund

Endiya Partners has closed its Rs 500 crore ($75 million) second venture capital fund with a commitment from a biotechnology fund backed by the government’s Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC), it said on January 4.

The Biotechnology Innovation Fund - AcE(Accelerating Entrepreneurs) Fund is a fund-of-funds investing in biotech startups and VC funds in the space, and has invested $2.5 million in Endiya

Endiya’s portfolio companies include Binny Bansal-backed diagnostics startup SigTuple and Darwinbox- which makes Human Resources systems in companies more efficient.

“Our focus continues to be on the enterprise software and business-to-business space along with healthcare technology- all of which have become more crucial in the post pandemic era,” said Dr Ramesh Byrapaneni, Managing Director at Endiya.

“BIRAC’s investment gives both of us a common alignment to find the right startups and work towards a common cause. They can also connect us to other entrepreneurs and experts in the biotech space.

Cardiologist-turned investor Byrapaneni started Endiya along with Sateesh Andra and Abhishek Srivastava in 2016. Endiya raised a debut Rs 175 crore fund in 2017 which it has fully deployed. It hit a first close of $40 million for the second fund in May 2019. 

Investors in Endiya’s current fund include the International Finance Corporation and the Nippon India Digital Innovation fund- an India-Japan initiative. Nippon is one of Japan’s largest life insurance players.

From the second fund, Endiya plans to make 18-20 investments of about $1 million each, with more money in follow-on rounds.

Endiya’s focus on the enterprise software space also comes at a time when software-as-a-service startups have been attracting rich valuations at aggressive multiples in public and private markets.

2020 saw two Indian SaaS unicorns- Zenoti and Postman- both valued at over a billion dollars each.

In addition, successful IPOs for software firm CloudFlare, Zoom’s share price skyrocketing and Slack being acquired for $27.7 billion by Salesforce further bolsters the environment.

“In the US, a B2B SaaS correction needs to happen. It has been a bit too exuberant. But these companies have the ability to gain a large market share soon and almost become a monopoly, while not burning cash. There have also been large mergers and acquisitions, boosting the space even more,” said Sateesh Andra, managing director at Endiya.