The early-stage venture capital fund Prime Venture Partners has announced the launch of its fourth fund which is its largest yet, with $100 million dollars which it will use to expand its reach into DeFi as well as two other areas.
In an interview with BusinessLine, Amit Somani, Managing Partner of Prime Venture Partners speaks about the fund, describing the interest in decentralised finance as a “mega trend”.
“The new trend of decentralised finance (DeFi) is way more than just cryptocurrency, it’s about blockchain and open protocols for decentralised supply finance. We will see an interesting new class of companies in this space, who are going to jump and focus on how one can really leverage blockchain and decentralized finance as an organizing principle and technology to solve usual problems like lending and invoices counting”
Established institutional investment in this round has been high, with International Finance Corporation (IFC) – part of the World Bank Group, contributing $15 million and coming on as a limited partner.
The venture investor is looking to back four to six investments per year, with Somani stating that they are going to continue to be very selective in who they choose to back. In line with global institutional interest in blockchain, Prime noted that they are looking to diversify with their latest fund and invest into new developing areas including blockchain technology.
Somani noted the rapid growth of start-ups in India, adding that this is something that Venture would continue to support:
“The number of unicorns in India have been growing in the past six months, but many of these conversations with some of the more institutional LPs can last multiple years. So everybody’s been tracking India and the beauty is that India is delivering. And I don’t mean just in the sense that there are unicorn companies, but in the sense that people are building real viable venture type businesses and scaling them really fast”
Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
