Aroa Venture Partners is a venture capital firm established in 2020. The firm has invested in companies like Unacademy, Urban Company and Cred, among others. Recently, they launched a new fund called Aroa Opportunities Fund. The target corpus for this fund is Rs 400 crore (about $50 million). The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) registered Aroa Opportunities Fund as a category II alternative investment fund (AIF) in October 2022. According to Gaurav Gulati, founder and managing partner of the firm, the fund has received in-principle commitments of over Rs 400 crore so far.
The investment plan for the fund is to invest from seed to Series C. The firm will lead the round from seed to Series A. However, for Series B and C, they will co-invest instead of leading. The firm has marked another Rs 400 crore over and above the final fund corpus as a greenshoe option.
The firm plans to deploy cheques of Rs 4 crore to Rs 40 crore across 20-25 startups from the new fund. Additionally, Aroa Venture Partners has a feeder vehicle in Singapore, which helps pool investment capital to invest into the master fund
Gulati stated that the firm's approach is largely multi-sector. However, real estate and Web3 are on the negative list. The firm believes that the real estate sector has matured, and sufficient pools of capital are available to take ventures in this space forward. The firm has yet to build conviction around scalable and commercial use cases for Web3, which is a very compelling area.
.jpg "Overcoming the Hurdles of Scaling a Startup")
