Investopad founders launch $25M maiden sector-agnostic early-stage fund Good Capital

The founders of seed-stage incubator Investopad have launched their maiden fund, the $25 million (about Rs 180 crore) sector-agnostic Good Capital - that will invest in the pre-seed to Series A funding rounds.

Founded by Rohan Malhotra and Arjun Malhotra, Good Capital has made its first close at $12 million, and counts Hong Kong and Singapore-based strategic investment company Symphony International Holdings as one of its anchor investors.

The Mauritius-registered fund has also onboarded a number of European family offices and Silicon Valley-based entrepreneurs, including Sunny Madra, co-founder of Autonomic, among its list of Limited Partners.

“Good Capital gives us the opportunity to provide meaningful capital and access to the companies that we are backing. We are thrilled to bring on some of the best-in-class institutional investment firms and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to be a part of the early-stage opportunity in India,” Rohan Malhotra, managing partner at Good Capital, said.

The Malhotras, through Investopad, had earlier backed social commerce startup Meesho, which raised $125 million in a round led by South African media and internet major Naspers in August. They also count Katerra, the SoftBank-backed construction technology startup, and Autonomic, the cloud services startup acquired by Ford Motor Co last year.

The development comes even as a number of marquee investors, such as Sequoia Capital, have launched their seed-stage investment vehicles, at a time when early-stage financing for India’s startup ecosystem has dipped.

In April, ET was the first to report that Sequoia Capital was in the process of raising its first seed fund in India with a target corpus of $150-$200 million. More recently, Flipkart also announced a fund to back early-stage startups to seed innovation in areas related to ecommerce ecosystem.

"Conventionally, funds have targeted the top of the pyramid by exploring visible opportunities and replicated US companies and models. In contrast, Good Capital's first principles thinking applied to India's larger economy, which is coming online at scale with a supporting ecosystem for the first time, has been refreshing to see,” Dinesh Moorjani, managing director at Comcast Ventures and co-founder, Tinder, said.

The early-stage firm, which will invest between $100,000-$2 million in B2B and B2C ventures, has made two investments thus far -live commerce venture SimSim and augmented reality startup Spatial, which also counts Uber co-founder Garrett Camp, and Zynga founder Mark Pincus, as early investors.

The firm has also counts Sanjay Kapoor, the former chief executive of Airtel and Micromax, Kashyap Deorah, founder of HyperTrack and Rahul Khanna, managing partner of venture debt firm Trifecta Capital as part of its investment committee.