Stellaris Venture raised $225mn for its second fund

Early-stage investor Stellaris Venture Partners said it has raised $225 million for its second India-dedicated fund, coinciding with an unprecedented funding ecosystem fuelling the homegrown start-up and technology sector. The corpus cleaned up by Stellaris is just about three times the size of its $90 million maiden fund, launched four years ago.

This makes the four-year-old Bengaluru firm among the biggest in the seed-to-series A stage funds in India, a section which has seen heightened interest over past few years.

Established in 2017 by three previous Helion Venture Partners chiefs, Ritesh Banglani, Alok Goyal and Rahul Chowdhri, Stellaris is important for another breed of funds that arose after the first bull cycle in India’s start-up environment. The trio had together excited Helion, one of the oldest homegrown venture capital firms, in December 2015 to focus exclusively on technology investments.

Stellaris, which has backed start-ups, for example, consumer brand Mamaearth, software as-a-service (SaaS) firm Whatfix, and wellbeing tech platform Mfine, has caught 80% of the capital from worldwide limited partners (LPs) for Fund-II, with the rest of the dry powder coming from Indian entrepreneurs, family offices and others.