Venture Catalysts' 9Unicorns raises Rs 100 crore from Haldiram's, others

9Unicorns, the accelerator fund of Mumbai-based Venture Catalysts, has announced Rs 100 crore as the second close of its fund with participation from the country's leading sweets and snacks manufacturer Haldiram's and other global investors.

The company didn't share the name of the other investors. The investment corpus now stands at Rs 200 crore after the early-stage startup fund announced the first close at Rs 100 crore in August, with plans to raise Rs 300 crore overall. However, on the back of growing interest among domestic and global investors, 9Unicorns has now expanded the corpus to Rs 500 crore.

The fund plans to raise the remaining amount in the next few months from limited partners comprising corporations, family offices, and institutions globally.

The corpus has been increased by exercising a green-shoe option amid a challenging economic environment. A green-shoe option allows a venture capital or private equity fund to raise money over its initial target corpus following interest from the limited partners.

"Our investment in 9Unicorns weaves well with our ideology of active contribution to the coming-of-age startup universe in India. With this collaboration, we look forward to partnering actively with the 9Unicorns team to bear our experiences and mentoring the innovative digitally run 9unicorns investees," said Kamal Agrawal,  Executive Director, Haldiram's.

9Unicorns plans to write the first external cheque in over 100 early-stage startups in deeptech, B2B SaaS, media, FMCG, fin-tech, insure-tech, health-tech, edu-tech, travel and logistics space.

"Last year was indeed a great year for the startup ecosystem that witnessed the creation of 11 unicorns. As a fund, we aim to back early-stage companies that have the potential to become billion-dollar companies in the future ," said Dr. Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, Managing Director of 9Unicorns and co-founder of Venture Catalysts.

Sharma said expected the number of unicorns in India to grow four times from 44 over the next few years,  which would offer investors an opportunity to be a "supporting agent and ensure multiple X returns from this emerging asset class".

9Unicorns has closed 32 deals within the first year of its launch including companies such as Tock, Janani and Qin1, some of which have already advanced to raise bigger rounds.

It is backed by family offices of organisations such as the OPG Group, MBG Group, Parakh Foods, Qualcon International, UB Cotton, along-with top executives from SAP, Linkedin, Quest Global, AB InDev, Fujitsu besides several unicorn and Decacorn founders.