pi Ventures, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) and IoT-focused early stage venture fund has announced second close of their $30 million fund by securing funding of $25 million (approx Rs 160 crore) from Hero Enterprise’s chairman Sunil Kant Munjal, Electronic Development Fund (managed by Canbank Ventures), Hero Electronixs, and a few HNIs and entrepreneurs including existing investors.
The fund has already received backing from SIDBI, In Colour Capital from Canada, Accel Partners, IFC, and angel investors like Mohandas Pai and entrepreneurs such as Binny Bansal, Deep Kalra, and Sanjeev Bikhchandani. In May 2017, International Finance Corporation (IFC), the investing arm of the World Bank Group invested $3 million into pi Ventures. Before that, it had secured $13 million from a group of angel investors and HNIs.
The venture firm was co-founded by Manish Singhal and Umakant Soni and will look to in early-stage start-ups that focus on solving problems in healthcare, logistics, retail, fin-tech and enterprise sectors using AI, Machines Learning, and IoT. The Bangalore-based VC firm said that it plans to invest in 18-20 start-ups over a 3-4 year time frame.
As of now, pi Ventures has made four investments in the healthcare & energy space so:
-It had invested an undisclosed amount last month into NIRAMAI Health Analytix, a startup which uses AI and machine learning to diagnose breast cancer.
-It invested an undisclosed amount into SigTuple, a medical diagnostic startup that performs diagnosis using analytics and patient history.
-pi Ventures also invested around $1.18 million in IoT startup Zenatix that looks at conserving energy/electricity using predictive insights and machine learning.
-Ten3T, a startup that makes wearable medical devices for real-time health monitoring had raised an undisclosed amount of funding from pi Ventures in December, 2016.
