According to reports, AJVC, an early-stage venture capital firm founded by Aviral Bhatnagar, who formerly led enterprise software and artificial intelligence (AI) investments for Venture Highway (now merged with General Catalyst) raises its planned corpus of Rs 100 crore, and is planning to exercise a greenshoe option to raise another Rs 50 crore.

A number of micro venture capital firms, or smaller sector-focused funds, were starting to appear in India to support early-stage startups at the time AJVC was established.

Aviral says, “We are seriously considering exercising the greenshoe option given the overwhelming interest in the fund.”

“The firm has backed nine pre-seed stage startups across sectors such as AI, business-to-business (B2B), consumer brands and consumer tech, adding that AJVC has a standard investment strategy of backing pre-seed companies with a Rs 1.5-crore cheque for 9 percent stake in the startup,” says Aviral.

The fund, which is primarily made up of domestic capital, counts Indian family offices, multiple founders of Indian tech unicorns and top executives at large investment firms as limited partners.

“A lot of funds that started out in 2022 or 2023 are in negative territory (in terms of returns) right now because they invested at high valuations. I think for us the good thing has been that valuations have been reset to a very large extent. The deals we’re seeing at our stage. They could have raised three-four times larger rounds two years ago given how much funds were deploying. We are much disciplined with valuations and we have standard cheques.,” adds Aviral.