Bharat Innovation Fund: Deep-tech seed-to-Series A fund for Bharat

Bharat Innovation Fund (BIF) is an early-stage venture capital fund that backs deep-tech and intellectual property-led startups from India. Launched in 2018 as a $100M thematic fund, it sits within CIIE.CO's innovation continuum and was incubated at IIMA Ventures, the entrepreneurship centre at IIM Ahmedabad. It operates as an autonomous initiative guided by its own board and investment team — and states explicitly that it is neither controlled by the Government of India nor by IIM Ahmedabad, and has no political affiliations.

Investment thesis

The fund's name is both tribute and acronym. Bharat nods to the alternative official name of India, and doubles as shorthand for its mission of building "Breakthrough Healthcare, Agriculture, Renewables and Advanced Technology" innovations from India. The core belief is that Indian entrepreneurs are producing globally competitive, IP-driven innovations — enabled by cutting-edge research and trends like AI, ML, IoT and India Stack — that can become dominant leaders globally, not only in the Indian context. Beyond capital, BIF offers what it calls valley-of-death financing: patient early capital plus access to global networks, distribution channels, strategic inputs, research infrastructure and deep sectoral understanding from its investors and team, to de-risk the long journey from lab to market.

Sectors, stages and cheque sizes

BIF invests at the seed or Series A stage — positioned at launch as a pre-Series A and Series A fund — and stays deeply engaged through a company's lifetime. Its focus themes span healthcare and biotech, agriculture, energy and enterprise tech. The fund announced a first close in 2018 towards its $100M target, with roughly $50M secured from corporates, banks, insurers and funds-of-funds, including SIDBI (through its Fund of Funds for Startups), ICICI Lombard, Philips, Bajaj Electricals and RBL Bank. Typical cheque sizes are not publicly disclosed. By 2021 the fund had deployed almost 40% of its $100M pool.

Notable portfolio

Among the deep-tech startups BIF has backed are credit-scoring platform CreditVidya, emotion-recognition startup Entropik Tech, industrial IoT company DeTech Technologies, AR-enabled toymaker PlayShifu and data-analytics platform vPhrase, alongside industrial AI firm Detect Technologies, offensive-security company FireCompass and fitness-tech startup Portl.

Partners and team

The partners combine venture investing, incubation, product-building and corporate leadership. They include managing partner Kunal Upadhyay and Shyam Menon — who also co-founded the cleantech fund Infuse Ventures — Ashwin Raguraman (formerly COO of the India Innovation Fund), Sanjay Jain (former product manager at Google and chief product manager at UIDAI) and Som Pal Choudhury (former managing director of Analog Devices, India).

Programmes and initiatives

Beyond the flagship deep-tech fund, the team runs the Bharat Inclusion Seed Fund, which provides equity to for-profit, scalable business models at the idea, seed or pre-Series A stage, targeting technology-led inclusion for India's next half billion across finance, health, agriculture, education and livelihood. PitchBook also lists a Bharat Climate Fund as managed by the team.

Credits and perks

No credits, perks or startup-support programmes are publicly documented.