Cornerstone Ventures launches second fund worth $200 mn for B2B startups

Cornerstone Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on Business-to-Business (B2B) enterprise investments, on Wednesday announced the launch of its second fund with a corpus of $200 million, with a greenshoe option.

Through the fund, investments will be made across stages, with a focus on early growth-stage Venture Capital bets. It offers flexible ticket sizes ranging from $5 million to $15 million.

Aside from capital, the fund also aims to provide entrepreneurs with access to a large enterprise customer ecosystem, access to strategic funding from next-round investors, and a large network of mentors and go-to-market partners, the firm said.

Through this fund, Cornerstone Ventures will concentrate on investing in emerging B2B technology opportunities across software platforms and marketplaces operating in diverse sectors such as financial services and insurance, retail, consumer goods and e-commerce, distribution and supply chain, healthcare products and services, and sector-agnostic core technology innovations.

“Our second fund builds on the success of Fund-I, and underscores our commitment to supporting emerging B2B Enterprise Tech opportunities. We aim to back some of the largest value creators in this space of ‘Next Generation Enterprise Technologies’, whether building in India for the world or building exclusively for the domestic market,” said Abhishek Prasad, Managing Partner at Cornerstone Ventures.

“We particularly like innovations that catalyse core business processes, engage multiple stakeholders across the value chain, thus building multiple revenue streams, and have demonstrable account-level profitability. Such businesses do not require capital for sustenance but really to drive growth,” he added.

Cornerstone launched its first fund in mid-2019 with a size of approximately $50 million, which is now deployed across 21 portfolio companies primarily focused on B2B Enterprise Software as a Service (SaaS) business models.

The fund, anchored by the Government of India’s Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) Fund of Funds (managed by SIDBI) and Self-Reliant India Fund managed by State Bank of India (SBI) – the largest bank in India, has since seen over a four-fold growth in the cumulative revenue base across the portfolio and has contributed to the creation of over 1,000 direct jobs and over 15,000 indirect livelihoods.

Cornerstone says it is in the process of onboarding several such large institutional investors in Fund-II as well.

First Published: Apr 10 2024 | 7:10 AM IST