Inflection Point seeks $50m for India early-stage fund
India’s Inflection Point Ventures, an early-stage investment platform with about 2,000 angel members, has launched a fund with an initial target of USD 50m.
The vehicle, known as Physis Capital, will seek commitments from Inflection Point’s existing individual investors, as well as family offices across India, the Middle East, and the UK. A first close of USD 20m is expected in July, and a greenshoe option could take the corpus as high as USD 75m.
Inflection Point was founded in 2018 as CXO Genie to connect a diverse angel community with domestic start-ups with a sector-agnostic approach that includes non-monetary support. It claims to provide complete transparency around valuation, findings during due diligence, and personal interest to its investors.
Physis will invest in 15-20 start-ups up to the Series B stage, writing checks in a range of USD 2-10m. Early investments include dating app TrulyMadly, e-sports company AFK Gaming, agriculture technology provider Otipy, remote healthcare services company iKure, and 3D printing developer Fabheads.
Up to half of the fund will be used for follow-on rounds. “There have been 28 follow-on rounds and, in a market, where early-stage investing has seen mortality rate of as high as 80%, we are at 4%,” Mitesh Shah, co-founder of Inflection Point, told The Economic Times.
Inflection Point has invested 110 start-ups in total and achieved nine full exits and 12 partial exits. Full exits include children’s extra-curricular activities platform HobSpace, and personal loans platform Qbera.
An exit from payments provider BharatPe in March last year reportedly generated an 80x return and IRR of 477%. Five months later BharatPe raised a USD 370m round at a valuation of USD 2.8bn. That round included a USD 20m secondary portion said to facilitate various angel exits.
India has proven to be a robust angel ecosystem in recent years. In 2021, Artha Venture Fund, also an investor in HobSpace, raised about USD 30m for its debut vehicle, positioning itself as the country’s first micro VC. These are typically defined as angel consortia pooling less than USD 100m.
Indian Angel Network, which has historically claimed to be the largest network of angel in Asia, closed its first VC fund at about USD 53m in late 2019. The plan is to invest about 160 start-ups mobilising a community of about 400 individual investors.
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