Former BharatPe COO Dhruv Dhanraj Bahl launches maiden VC fund with total corpus of Rs 120 crore

Dhruv Dhanraj Bahl, former Chief Operating Officer at BharatPe, has launched his maiden venture capital fund called 'Eternal Capital' with a total corpus of Rs 120 crore, joining the list of operators from BharatPe who have turned venture capital investors.

Eternal Capital also includes a greenshoe option of another Rs 120 crore, bringing its total capacity to Rs 240 crore.

"The primary principle is that we are thesis-led and we believe in investing in companies that will sustain and transform the future...As an operator, I'm also well aware of how to measure mature metrics in startups to select them and invest in them," Bahl told Moneycontrol. 

"There are certain real-world problems that need to be addressed and an operator-led VC firm understands this the best way and comes up with a practical solution. That's where we stand out," Bahl added.

The firm has received commitments from operators and entrepreneurs such as Suhail Sameer (ex-CEO, BharatPe); Deep Kalra (Founder, MakeMyTrip); Tarun Mathur (Co-founder, PolicyBazaar); Vikas Gupta (CEO, VLCC); Adarsh Menon (President, ZoomCar); Nalin Negi (CEO, BharatPe); Sameer Chugh (Founder, Mosambee); and Saurabh Vashishtha, Kunal Suri and Amit Bagaria (Founders, SimSim).

"We have cheques starting from Rs 50 lakh to Rs 6 crore, there are also larger cheques from our LPs...We will have skin in the game similar to startups and LPs, and the more the LPs invest the more they will earn," Bahl said.

Eternal Capital received SEBI’s approval for a Category-I AIF in November 2023 and the fund has capped its fee for five years.

Bahl said that the fund is sector-agnostic and aims to build a diversified portfolio of 'solutions for the future', and plans to invest in 40 start-ups in their seed to pre-series A stages, over the next three years.

Bahl has invested in 50+ start-ups as an angel investor since 2020 by partnering with several prominent funds. Some of his portfolio ventures include Stupa Sports Analytics, Basic Home Loans, ApniBus, Volt Money, DrinkPrime, AdmitKard, GenWise, Vama, and Fleek, among others.

Bahl added that segments like SaaS and platform play startups, climate and clean tech, sports tech as well as consumer and D2C startups will be the key focus for the new fund.

"We have about six commitments which we will start deploying from the end of June...Towards end of this month we will start doing all the paper work," Bahl said.

In April of 2023, Suhail  Sameer, former BharatPe CEO, stepped down from his role to start OTP Venture Fund.

Also Read: Former BharatPe CEO Suhail Sameer to close debut fund with a corpus of Rs 400 crore

An "operator" here refers to founders and early employees of startups, executives at large tech companies, and experts in specific domains who go on to raise their own funds, leveraging their full-time job and sector knowledge to source, invest in, and support great startups.

These could be solo or multi-operator funds or a mix of operator-investor partnership funds.

A series of former executives of BharatPe have moved on since the start of 2022 to launch their ventures, joining the growing list of the so-called BharatPe mafia.

In fact, on April 12th BharatPe's co-founder and former managing director, Ashneer Grover announced the launching ZeroPe, which is still in testing mode, and has been developed by Third Unicorn, according to its Google Playstore listing.

Also Read: BharatPe co-founder Ashneer Grover set to re-enter fintech with ZeroPe app

BharatPe's founding members Tanmay Sagar and Satyam Nathani, along with co-founder Bhavik Koladiya, had started to work on a new SaaS venture, OTPless. Their BharatPe peers Manas Poddar, Sagar Satija, and Chirag Bhadiyadra soon joined them.

Last year, Anubhav Mathur, formerly the director of engineering at BharatPe, joined OTPLess as a CTO.

Former BharatPe chief business officer Pratekk Agarwaal is running his recently-closed early-stage VC fund GrowthCap Ventures to invest in fintech, deeptech and software-as-a-service (SaaS) sectors.

Former senior executives — Nehul Malhotra, Rajat Jain, and Geetanshu Singla— founded an elderly-focused application — GenWise. Former CTO Vijay Aggarwal is building CubeAPM, an application performance monitoring tool.

Former CPO Ankur Jain, who quit in October, is set to launch AI healthcare startup Jivi.ai.