Nandan Nilekani, Sanjeev Aggarwal launch a 'for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs' fund

The $100-million fund will cater to customer-focused startups where the product-market fit has already been established.

Infosys co-founder and Aadhaar man Nandan Nilekani has joined hands with former Helion Ventures’ Co-founder Sanjeev Aggarwal to set up a new advanced-stage fund called the Fundamentum Partnership.

The fund will invest in startups aiming to use technology to solve uniquely Indian problems. Investments will be long-term—10 years and beyond—with a focus on building value.

“It will lead investment rounds from $10 to $25 million in companies that have attained the product-market fit, have an initial momentum and are looking to scale up,” Fundamentum said in a statement.

The fund will start with a corpus of $100 million, which can go up to $200 million, raised mostly from entrepreneurs, many of whom are unicorn founders themselves.

Given the collective expertise of the members, there will also be an active focus on mentoring and guiding the portfolio companies by the entrepreneur-investors as well as by Nandan and Sanjeev.

From now on, Nandan said his engagement with the startup world will be only through Fundamentum.

“India continues to be blessed with phenomenal entrepreneurial talent and the attempt with this platform will be to see how we can amplify their success,” he said.

The fund's portfolio will also include Nandan’s current investments such as Railyatri, Sedemac, ShopX and Mubble, while Sanjeev will continue to be on the boards of Helion companies such as BigBasket and Shopclues.

“While India has earned recognition as a startup nation, it is as yet an unproven scale up nation… with Fundamentum we want to help build a much-needed ‘scale up’ ecosystem in the country,” said Sanjeev.

BigBasket human resources head Hari TN and former Infosys executive Sanjay Purohit will be advisors to the fund and work closely with the portfolio companies.