Avataar Venture Partners Raises $100 Million as Add-On Capital and Announces Three New Investments

Avataar Venture Partners (AVP) is pleased to formally announce a top-up fund of $100 million, in addition to the initial bigger funding round it had raised in 2019 to invest in business-to-business (B2B) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. This new opportunities fund will be used for strategic top-up opportunities in star portfolio companies as well as to make exciting new investments. With this raise, Avataar Venture Partners also welcomes a few large institutional funds – limited partnerships (LPs) across Europe and the USA – to its portfolio.

Avataar’s core focus is to make $10M to $30M growth-stage investments into B2B and SaaS companies that have at least $15M of annual recurring revenues and are looking to scale globally.

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Avataar, in a bulk portfolio deal, acquired stakes in six B2B SaaS companies—Appnomic, Capillary, CRMNext, ElasticRun, Manthan and Zenoti—from Norwest Venture Partners to kick off its fund. In addition, Avataar recently led the Series-C for SenseHQ and Series-B for RateGain with participation from other marquee co-investors like Accel, Google Ventures and TA Associates. SenseHQ is building the first AI-powered talent engagement platform for global companies with a specific focus on high-volume hiring and the gig workforce. RateGain (recently named Economic Times’ Most Innovative Startup of 2020) is the world’s leading travel and hospitality SaaS provider. The brands plan to use these funds to accelerate AI-enabled apps and strategic initiatives to help clients emerge even stronger from the pandemic. Finally, Avataar backed Heal Software Inc., with a new management team in the U.S. that has acquired the IP and assets of Appnomic and helped it pivot its product strategy to create the industry’s first AI IT infrastructure operations platform (AIOps).

The AVP team consists of Mohan Kumar, a former leader at Norwest Venture Partners and Motorola executive; Nishant Rao, previously the COO of Freshworks and executive at LinkedIn; and George Thangadurai, a former Intel executive.

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“The fact that our new LPs have entrusted us with additional capital less than a year and a half after going live with fund—despite purely remote interactions during the pandemic—is inspiring,” said Mohan Kumar, the founding partner of AVP. “One of our core beliefs has been that to successfully build, scale and accelerate the growth of companies, entrepreneurs need partners with operational action biases. Over the past 18 months of working with our portfolio companies, Avataar’s operating venture capital model has delivered exactly that.”

Nishant Rao mentions, “Partnering closely with our entrepreneurs, our interventions on unit economics have helped three new portfolio businesses hit profitability. For others, we have focused more on helping fine-tune their growth engines. Finally, we have helped frame out key strategic imperatives and spur inorganic growth.”

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