Athera Venture appoints Rajiv Mehta as general partner; aims for first close of Rs 900-crore Fund-IV this year

The former Arvind Sports & Fashion Brands and Puma executive will join the founding team of the Bengaluru-based firm, which comprises Samir Kumar, Parag Dhol and Rutvik Doshi.

The early-stage VC firm, which made 35 investments aggregating to Rs 863 crore in Indian startups through its first three funds, aims to make the first close of Rs 300 crore of its fourth fund in the second half of 2023. The fourth fund of Rs 900 crore was launched last year.

“With his extensive experience in building and scaling businesses, we are confident that Rajiv’s appointment will add immense value to our portfolio companies. His entrepreneurial mindset and ability to identify potential pitfalls and opportunities will help our start-ups navigate the challenges of growth and achieve their full potential,” Doshi, who is also a general partner at Athera said.

Talking to ET about Athera’s Fund-IV, Mehta said that the firm would continue its investment thesis of backing companies in the consumer internet, B2B software-as-a-service (SaaS), and emerging tech spaces.

Speaking about the consumer internet segment, he said, “What we saw in the early stage of e-commerce was pure commerce, which was followed by food delivery that came in the last few years. Now what we see is that anything to do with credit or finance. Several players have entered this space. Our thesis is that what happened with e-commerce will now happen in health. Health will begin to come as a service”.

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This will be Athera’s second exclusive India-focused fund. The firm has been investing in Indian startups since 2006. Athera’s first two funds were focused on investment opportunities across India and the US.Through its third fund, which Mehta said is almost fully deployed now barring the reserves, Athera invested across 14 new startups including space-tech firm Pixxel; interactive toys company Playshifu and automotive company Euler Motors.

The Fund-III, which was Rs 369 crore in corpus, was launched in 2019. By comparison, through the Fund-IV, Athera plans to invest in around 18 startups even with a corpus that is more than double of its last fund.

“We have done 14 investments in Fund 3, and except for reserves it has been fully deployed…we believe (from Fund-IV) we’ll invest in about 18 companies – give or take 10% more or less – so it will be roughly Rs 50 crore a company, and so the first cheque size will be roughly Rs 18-20 crore. Then we’ll keep some reserves so that in the follow-on rounds, we don’t get diluted too much,” he said.

He also said that for the latest fund, close to 90% of the limited partners have been with the firm from before, while the remaining 10% would be new sponsors.

“There are certain LPs who have been with us since 2008, there are also founders who we have given exits. We have institutions that have increased their allocation over funds progressively. In Fund-IV, a large part of the LPs are the ones who have been with us before, and there will be some portion that are new investors,” he said.

Some of the prominent founders of Athera’s portfolio companies, who are investing as part of the latest fundraise, include Redbus’ Phanindra Sama, and PolicyBazaar’s Yashish Dahiya and Alok Bansal.