(Bloomberg) -- A venture capital fund with an initial corpus of $85 million has been set up by top entrepreneurs to back Indian startups in the software-as-a-service, or SaaS, segment in a bid to establish the country as a product hub.
Called the Together Fund, created by leaders including Girish Mathrubootham, founder and chief executive officer of Freshworks Inc., Manav Garg, founder of Eka Corporation and Shubham Gupta who led SaaS investments at venture firm, Matrix Capital, it will support founders through their growth and challenges, according to a statement. The fourth founder is Avinash Raghava who has worked on community initiatives at Indian software groups such as Nasscom, ISPIRT and SaaSBOOMi.
Over a thousand India SaaS startups are funded and ten of them are unicorns, generating as much as $3 billion in annual subscription revenues, according to a recent report released by consultancy McKinsey & Co. and the country's software industry trade group, Nasscom, along with trade body SaasBOOMi. The number of unicorns could increase 10-fold by 2030, reaching $1 trillion in value and create half-a-million jobs by 2030, the report predicted.
“I was lucky enough to find great investors and employees who saw the possibility of my ambitions,” Mathrubootham wrote in a blog announcing the launch of the Together Fund. His company started with six members in a small garage in the coastal city of Chennai in southern India and has grown to a 3,800-member startup with offices around the globe.
Apart from the funding, over 150 founders as well as executives such as product and engineering heads and designers, both in India and the Silicon Valley, will help budding entrepreneurs with guidance on building products and selling them globally.
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