Prime Venture to invest in logistics, SaaS

Venture capital firm Prime Venture Partners is planning to increase its focus on start-ups working in the logistics and SaaS (software as a service) space, apart from edutech and health segments.

The Bengaluru-based firm, which has closed nine fintech deals of its total portfolio of 20, remains bullish on the financial services space which is undergoing digitisation.

“Our theme is usually if the sector is getting digitised and whether the firm has a compelling use case. In this regard, besides financial services, you will see a lot from us in the health care, logistics and education spaces,” said Sanjay Swamy, co-founder and managing partner at Prime Venture Partners. “Also, we are quite bullish on start-ups in the SaaS segment, which are based out of India and are selling overseas. Probably, we will do some deals in this segment next year,” he said.

Swamy, who worked with the Unique Identification Authority of India as a volunteer, said his firm would continue to invest in fintech.

Prime Venture Partners was founded in 2011 and closed its first fund in 2012 with a corpus of $8 million. It raised $46 million in 2015. In the latest round in March, it raised $60 million from investors. “We raised $60 million well before the previous fund got exhausted. We will not require further capital for around another two years. We have investors who are thinking for the long term and don’t have any pressure for exits,” Swamy said, adding that the company had enough reserve capital for doing follow-on rounds in some of its portfolio companies.

The company had one exit so far in one of its earlier portfolio companies, ZipDial — a mobile marketing firm — which was acquired by Twitter in 2015.

Prime Ventures has invested in online lending firm MoneyTap, digital payments start-up Ezetap, B2B software provider Synup, and online skill assessment portal HackerEarth, and fintech start-up NiYO solutions. The company has also invested in AffordPlan and mfine, which work in health care.