Cross-border venture capital (VC) firm Transit Capital is in talks to raise its debut fund and is targeting a corpus of $50-60 million, two people aware of the development said. “The fund will focus on investing in tech start-ups that have a cross-border angle. These might be start-ups based overseas but with a big user base here in India or those that have back-end operations here,” said one of the two persons cited above, requesting anonymity as the talks are private.
Transit Capital is headed by Kumar Shah, who was previously associated with mobile phone maker Micromax as its head of mergers and acquisitions. The firm was spun out of Micromax’s corporate venture capital programme.
“The strategy at Transit Capital is to back business models that can work across multiple geographies. The strategy is similar to the investments that Shah made with Micromax,” the person cited above added.
Shah declined to comment.
Micromax, which started investing in start-ups in 2014, has a portfolio that includes music streaming website Gaana, travel booking platform Ixigo, and HealthifyMe, an online weight-loss and wellness platform.
Transit is the latest entrant into the cross-border venture investing space in India, which already has a bunch of investors including home-grown VC funds IvyCap and Unicorn Ventures. In June, Unicorn India Ventures announced a cross-border fund to invest in UK-based start-ups in partnership with Ascension Ventures, a UK-based venture fund. It plans to raise up to £5 million per year to invest in firms building products and services relevant to the Indian market.
In February, IvyCap Ventures said it will launch a ₹640 crore ($100 million) fund between India and Israel, to follow the Indian and Israeli governments’ plans to invest in science and technology.
Inventus Capital Partners, an early stage investor in the US and India, earlier had a cross-border fund, which it later separated into a pure-play India fund and a separate Silicon Valley Fund, according its website.
Source: Mint