Chennai: With 32 deals in its first year of operations, Mumbai-based 9Unicorns has emerged as one of the fastest growing players in the startup accelerator arena.
According to a press release here, it is a Rs 300-crore sector-agnostic fund, from the stable of India’s leading integrated incubator Venture Catalysts (VCats), and has invested in nearly three start-ups every month on an average in its maiden year 2020.
“9Unicorns is stringent with its selection process. It rejects 90 start-up applications for every start-up selected to ensure excellence. The process helps the fund create category leaders and improves these start-ups’ chance to become the next Unicorn. For example, few of its investees– Toch, Janani AI, and Qin1, have already advanced to raise next rounds at significantly higher valuations within six months of investment. It has so far invested in DeepTech, B2B SaaS, Media, FMCG, FinTech, InsureTech, HealthTech, and EduTech sectors,” the release said.
Abhijeet Pai, partner at 9Unicorns, stated, “At 9unicorns we endeavour to bring in a tectonic shift in idea/early stage investing and hope to demonstrate long term value creation and disruption”.
As of December 2020, it has invested over Rs 240 crore through syndication with co-investors such as Sequoia Surge, Titan Capital, SOSV, Lightspeed, Matrix Partners, and Nexus Ventures, amongst others. The syndication also includes some of the country’s leading âsuper angelsâ namely- Ritesh Agarwal (OYO), Pankaj Chaddah (Zomato), Anand Chadrashekharan (Facebook), Ramakant Sharma (LivSpace), Amrish Rau (Citrus Pay), Harsh Shah (Fynd), Manindar Gulati (OYO), VikalpSahni (Goibibo) and Sanjiv Bajaj (Bajaj Capital) amongst hundred others.
Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, founder of 9Unicorns, said, “We have no shortage of entrepreneurs with top-notch grit, hustle, talent, and ambition. At 9Unicorns, we strongly believe that India will witness Airbnb IPO-type massive liquidity events, and so we back the entrepreneurs early on. Built from scratch in India, we want to be India’s own YCombinator.”
9Unicorns is backed by several well-known global LPs from across ten countries, family offices of large organisations such as The OPG Group, The MBG Group, Qualcon International, UB Cotton, along-with top executives from SAP, Linkedin, Quest Global, AB InDev, Fujitsu, etc.