Silicon Valley investor to launch two new funds for tech start-ups

Silicon Valley-based Indian entrepreneur and investor Amit Rathore, and two other US-based investors, are launching two new funds with a combined corpus of about $244 million to invest in early-stage and late-stage technology ventures in countries including the US and India.

Rathore, the founder of Silicon Valley-based digital publishing start-up Quintype, has launched a small-scale venturecapital firm along with Gunther Sonnenfeld and Andrew Markell called Higher Order VC, which will be launching the two new funds.

Raghav Bahl, founder of Quintillion Media Pvt. Ltd, was an early investor in Quintype.

In an interview, Rathore said the funds “should be closed by July,” having received a majority of commitments from limited partners (LPs) for both the funds, called Return Capital I and II, which will invest in techbased ventures, in areas including data analytics, digital media and technology products.

Higher Order VC will also have other partners based out of London, Hong Kong and India managing the funds.

“The first fund will mostly invest in early-stage firms and when these start-ups start to raise their next round, we would like to keep our percentage or double down, which will come from the second fund. If the ideas are growing fast, we’ll invest from the second fund,” said Rathore, adding the funds were ready to be deployed.

“We believe that the time-cycle of average start-ups should go down from seven years to perhaps five years or four years in this Internet age. We want to use data to potentially increase returns in venture capital,” he said, adding that the ticket sizes of each deal will not be very large.

“We won’t be doing $10-20 million rounds anytime soon,” he added.