Early Stage focused micro VC firm Trillion Dollar Ventures has announced the launch of their second fund with a total corpus of Rs 50 Crore. The fund aims to back innovative founders with a global outlook from Day 1, supporting companies in the pre-seed and seed stages with cheque sizes ranging from Rs 1-2 crore per startup. The vision of the fund is to collaborate and nurture companies that can potentially become Trillion Dollar Ventures of tomorrow.
Founded in 2021, by Ujwal Sutaria, Founder & General Partner, TDV Partners, is a 2X founder turned investor, thus bringing in founders experience along with investing. He collaborates with entrepreneurs from pre-revenue stages, offering support in brainstorming ideas, finding PMF, gaining early traction and follow-on fundraising. The firm’s investment thesis focuses on backing serial founders or those with deep domain expertise, with a strong preference for high-tech, low-operations businesses. The fund lifecycle has also been kept between 5 – 7 years which is half of traditional fund life cycles that ranges from 10 – 12 years, thus returning capital faster to the LPs for more active deployments.
With the new fund launch, the VC firm will invest in business models like Platform plays, Marketplaces, and Exchange businesses across various consumer tech(B2C) categories such as Spirituality Tech, Fintech, Gaming, Creator Economy, Social, and Consumer Upgrade. TDV is one of the few funds in India today focusing on new category building segments like spiritual tech and consumer upgrade. The firm believes that they are at an inflection point to scout early stage companies in these sectors and back some of the eventual category winners generating a multi-bagger opportunity for the fund.
TDV Partners plans to begin deploying capital from Q3 of this financial year.
Ujwal Sutaria, Founder & GP, TDV Partners, says, “We want to back startups with potential of Trillion Dollar outcomes as our name reflects our genesis of backing startups. We believe in taking non consensus bets which is where a fund makes the alpha. Our proven track record with the last fund has encouraged us to double the target corpus with the second fund and increase the average investment size too. With our first fund, we have provided an exit opportunity within 2 years of investing in the company and generated over 60% IRR. The Fund I MOIC is 3 within two and a half years. We are confident of continuing our track record with the new fund as well.”
The Fund has already been receiving strong commitments from LPs in India as well as across countries like US, UK, UAE, SG further validating the early stage investment model and the high returns it can generate. The backers include top global unicorn founders, family offices and many CXOs across industries globally.
“There are few pre-seed focused funds in India, creating a bottleneck for visionary founders to raise capital quickly. We want to fill this market gap and provide support, access and growth to startups in addition to capital infusion,” he adds.
The due diligence process at TDV Ventures places a strong emphasis on founders. Significant time is spent understanding what founders are building, why they are building it, their vision, and how they plan to execute. This includes exploring the type of company they aim to create. Alongside traditional evaluations such as market size, competitor landscape, and potential to win, TDV Partners also focuses on how they can add value to the founders and their startups, making this a key differentiator in the investment process.
TDV Partners anticipates making 10-12 investments annually. Ujwal, with six+ years of startup investing experience and having run TDV Partners for the past three years, has already backed more than 30 companies, half of which have gone on to raise subsequent funding rounds.
Ujwal Sutaria has extensive experience in venture capital and entrepreneurship. Previously an Associate Director at InnoVen Capital, he managed companies like Swiggy, Eruditus, Licious and Blackbuck. A 2X entrepreneur, Ujwal founded Athletto and FruitOn, and began his career at Powergrid, handling commercial aspects of their multibillion assets across India.
