Binny Bansal backed venture capital fund raises $32 million
The venture capital fund named '021' is founded by Sailesh Tulshan and has Binny Bansal as the anchor investor, with participation from several former Flipkart employees
Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal continues to make a stronger imprint on the Indian startup ecosystem by raising close to $32 million for a venture capital fund, where he is the anchor investor.
The venture capital fund named 021 (zero to one) was founded by Binny’s financial advisor Sailesh Tulshan in 2017. The fund raise by 021 saw limited partner participation from the Azim Premji Foundation, and other former employees of Flipkart, according to a media report.
The other limited partners in this fund include Mukesh Bansal, founder of Myntra and Curefit, Sameer Nigam of PhonePe, MakeMyTrip India CEO Rajesh Magow, Myntra CEO Ananth Narayanan and former Flipkart executive Mekin Maheshwari. Besides, former senior executives of Facebook and Dropbox Ruchi Sanghvi and Aditya Agarwal are also a part of the group that invested in 021.
This venture capital fund has already made around six investments, which include biotech startup Pandorum Technologies and Ycook, which makes ready-to-cook food. 021 Capital is keen to invest in areas such as artificial intelligence, biotech, agricultural technology, supply chain and logistics, and consumer internet.
This Bengaluru-based firm is targeting a final close of $50 million by the end of this year and its scope of investments will extend outside India into countries such as Indonesia and Singapore.
Binny has been an active participant in the Indian startup ecosystem, having made several angel investments while also being closely associated with a few venture capital funds.
021 will have a two-person investment committee headed by Binny and Tulshan. Both of them have known each other for a significant amount of time and Tulshan has been the key adviser for Binny for investments in startups such as Sigtuple, Niramai, Stellapps. Tulshan was also the key adviser in Binny’s investment into insurance startup Acko.
Binny, who resigned as Group CEO of Flipkart in November last year, has been active with various plans regarding investments in the startup community. He has also launched strategic consulting company xto10x Technologies in partnership with Saikiran Krishnamurthy.
