Nandan Nilekani teams up with Sanjeev Aggarwal for $100mn fund

Called the 'The Fundamentum Partnership', the platform will lead investment rounds ranging between USD 10-25 million in companies that are looking at scaling up and have attained a certain product market fit.

Infosys co-founder and founder chairman of UIDAI Nandan Nilekani. Photo: IANS

Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani has partnered venture capital veteran Sanjeev Aggarwal to set up a USD 100 million fund that will focus on building "enduring technology companies" out of India, specially consumer technology.

Called the 'The Fundamentum Partnership', the platform will lead investment rounds ranging between USD 10-25 million in companies that are looking at scaling up and have attained a certain product market fit.

"In a marked departure from industry practice, Fundamentum founders will not be charging any fund management fee or carried interest," it said in a statement.

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Aggarwal -- who had also founded of BPO firm Daksh -- will continue to also actively manage the portfolio of Helion Venture Partners (which he co-founded) along with other co- founders.

"Fundamentum will have an initial corpus of USD 100 million but it will be extended to USD 200 million if good opportunities come along," the statement said.

It added that the capital will also be contributed by a select set of long-term institutional investors.

While the focus is on consumer technology businesses, a portion of the capital will also go into enterprise technology/outsourcing companies serving global corporations.

Both Nilekani and Aggarwal have played key roles in building technology companies. Nilekani has made personal investments in a clutch of start-ups including ShopX, RailYatri, LetsVenture, Sedemac and Power2SME.

Going forward, he will not make any more direct start-up investments and Fundamentum will be the sole platform for his engagement with the start-up ecosystem.

Nilekani will be actively engaged in selecting and mentoring the chosen companies. "India continues to be blessed with phenomenal entrepreneurial talent and the attempt with this platform will be to see how we can amplify their success," he said.

Aggarwal, on the other hand, has a strong record of 'scale up' investing at Helion with names like MakeMyTrip, ShopClues, BigBasket among others.

"Ten years ago, with Helion, the attempt was to participate in creating a 'startup' ecosystem in India and now with Fundamentum, we want to help build a much needed 'scale up' ecosystem in the country," he said.

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