3one4 Capital launches USD 50 Mn Continuum I fund
3one4 Capital has launched its Continuum I fund with a target corpus of INR 350 Crores (USD 50 Mn) and has completed its first close for commitments of INR 150 Cr. Continuum I will focus on Series B+ rounds of companies from the 3one4 Capital portfolio with cheque sizes between USD 3 Mn to USD 5 Mn.
With this new corpus, 3one4 plans to enhance its deep involvement model across multiple stages and work more closely with the founding teams to scale their current advantages and capture market leadership.
With the final close of this new fund and other initiatives in the pipeline, the 3one4 Capital firm will manage a combined corpus of over INR 750 Crores (over USD 100 Mn).
A top-tier university endowment in the United States with a USD + 7 Bn portfolio of global investments is a significant investor in Continuum I. This marks one of their largest allocations to an Indian venture capital firm. Sojitz Corporation, a leading global conglomerate from Japan, has announced its investment in ‘Continuum I’ together with its plans to open a new office in Bangalore, India. This is the first venture capital investment made by the Sojitz Corporation in India. Sojitz will partner with ‘Continuum I’ to explore deeper technological and business relationships with the portfolio companies, as well as utilise its global network and broad knowledge base to enhance value creation via strategic alignment.
“Continuum I will focus on investing into a curated selection of opportunities from the 3one4 Capital portfolio and will aim to invest in the growth stages of these companies. The fund’s objective is to develop a strategic and long-term partnership with top-tier institutional pools of capital globally and help improve access to high-quality growth capital for the portfolio companies across 3one4 Capital’s funds,” read a communiqué from 3one4.
3one4 Capital was founded by Pranav Pai and Siddarth Pai, sons of Mohandas Pai.
3one4 Capital Fund I was launched early in 2016 with a corpus of INR 100 Cr. 3one4 Capital Fund II for INR 250 Cr was oversubscribed and subsequently launched in 2017. “Since then, the fund has built a wide-ranging portfolio across its investment focus areas spanning 50+ companies. Having built a robust pipeline, developed a proprietary software stack to manage end-to-end processes from deal sourcing to portfolio management and exit simulations, and finessed a deep involvement model with multiple founding teams, Continuum I is positioned as a natural evolution of this model at scale,” read the communiqué.
“This is the first successful case ever since the Ministry of Economy along with JETRO started the Indo-Japan Start-up Hub last May in Bangalore. Sojitz, one of the major trading companies in Japan, has now invested in Bangalore exclusively for the purpose of start-up initiatives. This trend will accelerate other Japanese investors to invest in Bangalore. This will further be facilitated by the new direct flight from Tokyo to Bangalore that has been announced recently. The business set-up is now ready to take-off. Even though Japan has been a late comer, we are now catching up fast,” said Takayuki Kitagawa, Consul-General of Japan in Bangalore.
“With large strategic and financial institutional investors entering the fund, we continue to have an excellent and intellectually-diverse set of minds who bring unparalleled advantages to the fund and its portfolio companies. The investors span multiple geographies and have synergetic interests in 3one4 Capital and its portfolio. These new LPs will explore co-investment opportunities in rounds raised by the portfolio companies and will work closely with the founding teams to help deploy and scale their value propositions globally,” the company said in a release.
