Unicorn India Ventures: ₹1,200 crore of patient capital for India's deeptech moment

Unicorn India Ventures was founded in 2016 by Bhaskar Majumdar and Anil Joshi, two operators who built companies before they started funding them. The Mumbai-based, SEBI-registered Alternative Investment Fund describes its own raison d'être simply: enable entrepreneurs to build world-class products, disrupt traditional sectors and solve real-life problems.

The firm has deliberately rebuilt its thesis around patient capital for deeptech. It argues that deeptech startups are emerging from India's labs and solving world-class problems, but raising a fraction of what comparable US founders raise — and that deeptech cycles are long, revenue paths non-linear, and most domestic VCs were never built for that timeline. From its own site: UIV has been investing in deep tech since 2016, before the semiconductor missions and the policy shifts, across metro cities as well as smaller towns.

The fund history is fully public. Unicorn India Ventures Fund I launched in 2016 with a corpus of ₹100 crore and backed companies including SmartCoin, Open (the neo-banking platform), Sequretek, Pharmarack, Genrobotics, Clootrack and FutureCure. Fund II, a ₹300 crore fund launched in 2020, invested in 20 companies such as Gamerji, ForeignAdmits, Probus, Daalchini, Esmito and Finin. Across its three funds the firm has built a portfolio of nearly 50 companies, and its own site claims $4 billion in portfolio value created.

The flagship is Fund III: the firm closed its third fund at ₹1,200 crore, surpassing its initial target of ₹1,000 crore. The limited partner base includes HNIs, family offices and institutional investors, with backing from SIDBI, SBI and NABARD alongside the state governments of Kerala, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha. Fund III is a deeptech fund in practice, targeting semiconductors, spacetech and AI infrastructure — with the firm noting it is largely avoiding AI-application SaaS plays in favour of AI infrastructure such as semiconductors, data centres, power and enabling technologies, and even exploring nuclear micro power generation as a long-term enabler. The fund plans around 20 investments at an average ticket size of ₹10–15 crore, with first cheques of around $1–2 million.

The investment discipline is distinctive. UIV invests only 20 per cent of its investible corpus to create the portfolio and reserves the rest to back the winners, with follow-on discipline built in from day one. Cheque sizes typically run from ₹1 crore to ₹10 crore across seed to pre-Series A. The firm is explicit about what it avoids: high cash-burn businesses like D2C, consumer internet and content. Its stated focus is companies that are enablers of India's digitisation across sectors.

Beyond capital, the firm runs Founders' Forge, its community for early-stage founders — a working network rather than a newsletter, offering candid webinar sessions with seasoned operators, in-depth sector white papers, and a private peer network of founders across 12 sectors. Its stated mentor-capital practices include sector-native operating partners on call for hiring, go-to-market and pricing; a global network across London, Singapore, the Gulf and the Bay; board-level governance; and access to regulators and specialist counsel across India's regulatory landscape.