Mirae Asset Venture launches India dedicated early-stage fund

Mirae Asset Group, a leading financial services company headquartered in South Korea, will increase its investments into the Indian startup ecosystem with the launch of an India dedicated early-stage fund.

In a tweet, Ashish Dave, CEO, Mirae Asset Venture Investments, said, “We started with clean slate 2 years back & today have deployed over $200M. To further our commitment to Indian startup ecosystem, I am pleased to announce the launch of our India dedicated early stage fund.”

The new fund will be called Mirae Asset Venture Opportunities Fund 1, with a corpus of $35 million and an option to take it up to $75 million, according to reports. It will primarily focus on funding at seed and Series A stage.

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Mirae Asset Ventures has become an active investor in the Indian startup ecosystem, and some of the companies it has invested in include Ola, Zomato, Bigbasket, Shadowfox, ZoloStays etc.

The launch of an early-stage fund by Mirae Asset reveals its commitment to the Indian startup ecosystem. India is the third country after South Korea and China where Mirae operates a country-focused early-stage fund.

Across these three countries, Mirae manages $1.5 billion and has backed companies such as Didi Chuxing, Grab, Glovo etc.

In India, the new fund of Mirae will invest between $2 million to $4 million for deals ranging from seed to Series A rounds, over the next 12 to 18 months. It will invest in segments such as fintech, consumer internet and software-as-a-service (SaaS).

Ashish Dave, who had participated at a roundtable during TechSparks 2020 on the topic 'Is India ready for tech IPOs now?', was very confident about Indian startup going public.

“Till now, the ecosystem was very nascent with growth capital providing the fuel, but now we feel more realistic with many things falling in place,” he said.

Ashish felt that there are other skills which are required by founders when one is planning to go public. “One has to be an expert communicator where they have to educate the public investors about their company,” he said.