India's Ankur Capital raises $45.5m for Fund II

Incoming LPs include John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council, and National Bank for Agriculture & Rural Development. A first close of INR2.4 billion came in January last year with participation from CDC Group, Dutch Good Growth Fund, and Small Industries Development Bank of India.

Ankur raised INR500 million for its first fund in 2016 and went on to back 14 start-ups, including agriculture technology providers CropIn and BigHaat, as well as deep tech companies such as String Bio. String Bio combines methane, nitrogen, oxygen, and inorganic salt to create food - a process likened to beer fermentation but using gas as a substrate rather than barley.

Fund II will follow a similar strategy, investing across a range of verticals with a special interest in agtech and health tech. The plan is to invest in 16-18 companies, deploying up to $5 million per deal. There have been four investments to date, among them BigHaat, which operates an online retail platform for agriculture industry equipment.

Ankur is recognized as a local pioneer in agtech, having incubated the segment’s first local networking platform ThinkAg in 2018. Other investments in this space include Agricx, a B2B crop procurement and quality grading platform, and VeGrow, which helps small farms achieve efficiencies and economies of scale by aggregating their output.

“We are excited to support Ankur Capital as one of a select group of major investments that advance the goals of the global Catalytic Capital Consortium initiative,” Debra Schwartz, managing director for impact at MacArthur Foundation, said. “A powerful example of catalytic capital, Ankur’s focus on transformative technology has the potential to improve economic opportunity for low-income individuals across India.”

MacArthur’s Catalytic Capital Consortium has pooled $150 million to support funds, both impact-oriented and conventional, that pursue patient, risk-tolerant, concessionary, and flexible investment theses. The consortium, which also includes the likes of the Rockefeller Foundation and Omidyar Network, contributed $7.5 million to Ankur’s latest fund.

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Fundraising
• Venture
• India
• Ankur Capital
• Technology
• Agriculture