Singapore's Grayscale hits first close on debut VC fund
Grayscale Ventures, a Singapore-based VC firm set up last month by South Asia-focused investors at Japan’s Strive, has achieved a first close of about USD 10m on its debut fund.
The fund, which has a full target of USD 20m, will focus on seed-stage IT development infrastructure and artificial intelligence-enabled software start-ups in India. It is headed by Nikhil Kapur (pictured, left) and Siddharth Verma (right). Kapur was a partner at Strive for seven years, while Verma joined the firm as a principal in 2020.
Kapur and Verma - both engineers by training - were involved in the deployment of two funds at Strive. They chose to strike out on their own rather than participate in Fund III. Strive was founded as Gree Ventures in 2012 and rebranded in 2019.
“We invested USD 18m to USD 20m in the last six years. And now we’re sitting on 7x MOIC [multiple on invested capital] in India and Southeast Asia,” Verma told YourStory. “[T]hat gave us the confidence to start our own fund.”
LPs include founders and operators from Strive, as well as Nexus Venture Partners, Slack, Zendesk, GlobalWay, Hasura, and Ayoconnect.
Kapur led seed investments in Hasura and Ayoconnect at Strive. Hasura, an India-based data services player with global clients the likes of Airbus, Atlassian, and Walmart, raised a USD 100m round last year featuring Nexus at a valuation of USD 1bn.
The plan is to bring global software and related infrastructure developers onto the Grayscale platform as investors and advisors who can support portfolio company growth. Kapur said that he would also be hands-on in terms of helping companies with code and technical issues.
“Now I know that I am no longer in the race for becoming a ‘10x engineer.’ But at Grayscale, I’ll have the chance to enable such devs [developers] to fulfil their dream of building a legacy. And through them, I plan to live vicariously for the next two decades,” Kapur said in a statement.
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