New Delhi, Aug. 12 -- Speciale Invest, a Chennai-based venture capital firm that focuses on deep-tech startups, has closed its third fund after securing Rs 600 crore ($68.5 million) in commitments from its limited partners (LP), surpassing its initial target of Rs 500 crore. This is more than double the corpus it raised for its second vehicle.
The firm said in a statement on Tuesday it received commitments from returning LPs including family offices, institutions, and strategic investors for the fund.
"With Fund III, the firm will double down on sovereign-tech and deep-tech bets-across space-tech, dual-use defense innovation, frontier computing, and sustainable energy-while ensuring these innovations are globally competitive from day one," it said.
Through the fund, the VC firm will back about 18-20 early-stage startups over the next four years across sectors such as space, advanced manufacturing, energy, health, and artificial intelligence.
"We believe the next generation of global champions will emerge from India's labs, R&D centers, and workshops," said Vishesh Rajaram, managing partner, Speciale Invest. "In a geopolitically complex and technologically interdependent world, building for India's resilience and sovereign capabilities is not just a national imperative-it is also a generational venture opportunity."
Speciale Invest was founded in 2017 by Rajaram and Arjun Rao. The VC firm invests in pre-seed and seed rounds of deep-science and tech companies, with a focus on emerging technology areas such as spacetech, aerospace, green hydrogen, robotics, batteries, quantum-tech, AI-led SaaS, dev tools, data infrastructure, and large language model (LLM) applications and infrastructure.
Its portfolio includes Ultraviolette, Agnikul Cosmos, The ePlane Company, Cynlr, Qnu Labs, Galaxeye Space, Uravu Labs, NewTrace, e-TRNL Energy, Wingman, StreamAlive, Airboxr, and Trainn.
The VC firm closed its second fund in April 2022, raising Rs 286 crore from its limited partners. It raised its first fund of Rs 60 crore in 2018. The vehicle backed 18 companies with investments of less than $500,000 on average.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from VC Circle.