Helion co-founder launches $100m India fintech fund
Rahul Chandra, co-founder and managing director at India-based Helion Venture Partners, is looking to raise $100 million for an early-stage fund. He will retain his existing portfolio management responsibilities at Helion.
The new fund, known as Unitary Helion, will primarily invest in financial technology start-ups focusing on areas like alternative lending and digital payments. It will also pursue opportunities in digital networks and marketplaces that connect core sectors such as agriculture, logistics, and healthcare. The aim is to construct a portfolio of 18-20 companies.
Unitary is in talks with several strategic investors in the financial services space and Chandra told Livemint that he is targeting a first close of $40 million by October. He expects overseas investors to account for around 60% of the overall corpus.
Jonathan Hsu – who spent about five years at Facebook before moving to US-based Social Capital, where he serves as head of data science – will help the team develop in-house data analytics tools. Sanjeev Aggarwal and Ashish Gupta, co-founders and senior managing directors at Helion, will be advisors to the new fund. They, like Chandra, will also continue to manage the existing Helion portfolio.
“Venture investments in India are entering a new cycle with founders focussing on problems that are unique to India and those impacting hundreds of millions of lives. India is at a juncture where the platform for digital solutions has been laid with government-led initiatives such as Aadhar, UPI, and GST. We have a whole new generation of entrepreneurs leveraging this stack to reimagine solutions for challenging problems across large sectors,” Chandra said in a statement.
Aadhar is a biometric payments system, while Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is a mobile payments platform launched by the National Payments Corporation of India and GST refers to the digitization of payments under India’s Goods & Service Tax legislation.
Helion has more than $600 million in capital under management and closed its third fund in March 2012 at $255 million. The firm’s future was called into question at the end of 2015 with the departure of three of the six partners. Rahul Chowdhri, Ritesh Banglani and Alok Goyal subsequently launched Stellaris Venture Partners and reached a first close of $50 million on their debut fund in February.
Chandra’s investment career began in 1996 as the first hire in Walden International’s India office. He managed investments for the firm’s dedicated India fund between 1996 and 2000 and then spent three years working for them in Silicon Valley. This was followed by a stint as head of M&A at e4e, a Bay Area business process outsourcing company.
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