Welsh Canadian billionaire and technology entrepreneur Terry Matthews, who is also the founder of investment firm Wesley Clover International Corporation, has launched an India-focussed startup fund in collaboration with Pune-based tech incubator Ideas to Impacts Innovations Pvt. Ltd.
The investment vehicle, christened Alacrity India Fund, will have a $10-million corpus and will bring on board Indian angel groups, industrialists and corporates, besides Wesley Clover and Ideas to Impacts, the company said.
The fund will provide seed money for idea-stage and accelerator-stage startups in the business-to-business, software as a service space, with investment deal sizes of up to $750,000. Over the next five years, the company plans to support and mentor 30 startups.
According to the company, the startup incubator or accelerator will function out of a 32,000 sq ft space in Pune, and Alacrity India Fund will be the institutional venture fund.
“By expanding our Alacrity Global startup ecosystem to India, we are enabling Indian entrepreneurs and partners to create investable, global enterprises, while enabling our existing Alacrity startups to actively engage with the burgeoning Indian market,” Matthews said in a statement.
The Alacrity Global ecosystem is an initiative of Wesley Clover to bring investors, academic institutions, entrepreneurs and governments together to create technology startup funds around the globe. The company’s funds are present in Canada, the UK, France and Turkey. It is looking to launch operations in Mexico, China, Indonesia, Austria and Singapore in 2018.
Canada-based investment firm Wesley Clover was founded in 1972 and has so far backed over 100 companies. Its areas of interest include next-generation cloud and SaaS applications, services and hardware for fixed and mobile communications, video collaboration, customer engagement and analytics, according to information available on its website. Besides, its portfolios include real estate such as leisure properties.
Ideas to Impact offers a host of services, including technology offshoring, promoting ideas and incubating them, besides backing early-stage tech startups. It was founded by IIT-Bombay alumni Gireendra Kasmalkar, who had earlier founded Verisoft, SQS USA, SQS India Infosystems Pvt. Ltd and SQS India BFSI Ltd.
“Alacrity India will enable early-stage startups to address these challenges with our expertise of scaling up technology businesses. The Indian startup ecosystem will be strengthened by our sourcing of diverse problems and entrepreneurs from Tier II and III cities,” said Kasmalkar.
