pentathlon ventures: B2B SaaS investor Pentathlon Ventures launches $54.4 million Fund II

Pentathlon Ventures, which invests in early-stage business-to-business software-as-a-service startups, has announced the launch of its second fund with a target corpus of Rs 450 crore (about $54.4 million).

The firm aims to invest in 25 B2B SaaS startups via the new fund across areas of enterprise digital transformation, ecommerce enablement, fintech, vertical SaaS, applied AI, sustainable tech and healthtech.

For Fund II, Pentathlon Ventures said in a statement that it is raising capital from a mix of domestic and global limited partners encompassing business leaders, corporates and institutions. It declined to share names or identities of these limited partners.

“Many unicorns out of India are actually B2B. So B2B SaaS as a thesis has played out really well for us. Seed-stage is what we focus on, where companies have just started making revenues and they’re not really idea-stage where there’s just slides or just talking about it, but there is a product in the market and there are revenues,” the fund’s managing partner, Gireendra Kasmalkar, told ET.

The fund also hosts events under ‘GTMDialogues,’ an in-person programme through which it has built a community of SaaS founders and go-to-market (GTM) leaders to provide mentorship on aspects such as GTM strategies, product distribution and user acquisition.

The founding investments team – with experience of having built companies themselves – help its portfolio companies scale revenue, achieve product-market-fit, expand internationally, get funding and in exits, among other things, Kasmalkar said.

Through its first fund — $10 million in size and three years in lifecycle — Pentathlon Ventures has invested in 23 startups, including Deeptek, Rezolve, Spyne, Dista, TurboHire and ShopSe.With the new fund, Pentathlon Ventures’ ticket size will expand to between $750,000 and $1.2 million. A larger fund will let it lead investment rounds as well as participate in follow-on rounds in Series A and B, Kasmalkar said.

The second fund is expected to be deployed over the course of the next 2.5-3 years, from September 2023. It also expects to make its first close within September. For the latest fund, Pentathlon Ventures has also floated a Delaware-incorporated feeder fund.

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