Inside IvyCap's Tech Playbook
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A homegrown venture capital firm, and at the helm of it, founder and managing partner, Vikram Gupta, whose tech-focused investment thesis is making careful bets in artificial intelligence (AI), healthtech, and other deep tech sectors. The firm's origin is unique: a venture capital fund backed by Indian institutional money and a strong IIT alumni trust.
Through this, IvyCap is scaling up capital, with the idea to invest in very early-stage startups.
"And these new age technologies, which are in very early stages in their TRL (technology readiness level) 1, 2, 3 stages, to helping them build a very unique kind of technology stacks. And we've been quite fortunate to have made a lot of room and a lot of progress there," says Gupta.
Vikram says the idea is to help provide grants to such disruptive technologies. The firm is going into the deep pockets of all the IITs, IIMs, ISB, Indian Institute of Science, and others, leveraging these technologies and helping build centers of excellence. "That's how we can spot these technologies early on and even fund them for commercialization or even scale up."
The VC firm sees huge opportunities across deep tech, emerging tech areas. According to Gupta, there are quite a few examples of disruptions, for example, AI being an overarching theme has multiple areas, including vertical AI, horizontal AI, and infrastructure AI.
"Vertical AI is catering to sectors such as financial services, health care, or insurance. That is a unique opportunity building up. Horizontal AI, on the other hand, is building a lot of agentic AI tools and other AI disruptive technologies, which are catering to various models. And the infrastructure AI is working towards creating a lot of hardware support systems, like semiconductors, and setting up data centers and other things, which support the AI processing. So we are investing across all three areas," says Gupta.
Gupta also adds that the firm is looking at opportunities across areas such as space tech, defence tech, IoT devices, and other similar hardware technologies. "In addition, there are opportunities in blockchain and other areas as well. So we are going deeper in each of these areas through our collaborations with the IoTs and identifying specific talent across each of these verticals and horizontals."
Gupta believes that India is sitting at a very unique place to leverage these areas, and a lot of talent is now getting involved. "And with our funding and a lot of grant capital that we are building as a large pool of capital are likely to build this further."
However, it is not easy to catch these technology trends early on, with the firm looking at people involved in solving specific problems. "We look for the passion they have in driving these technologies."
"We also look at the specific business models being targeted and the understanding of the commercial side in terms of the problem getting solved. And I think some of these ideas are very disruptive. So when they're very disruptive, the risk is also very high."
Sometimes, these bets could become capital-intensive over a period of time, with the firm having to look at various factors.
"But if you were to break it down across different buckets, so one bucket is the bucket of the entrepreneur and the team, which is looking at their backgrounds. The second bucket is the business model, geographical spread, etc. There are all those kinds of things that we evaluate from a business model perspective. And the third piece is about the scale potential in terms of how large this can be," says Gupta.
Factsheet:
Corpus size: INR 5,000 crore
Portfolio: 55 Companies
Dragon Exits: Purplle at INR 330 Cr
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