IIM Ahmedabad’s Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) is poised to move forward with a new $150 million Bharat Innovations Fund which will focus on sectors like healthcare, agriculture and energy. The Infuse fund that CIIE launched in 2013 with a corpus of over $15 million, was only focussed on the clean energy and green-tech space.

Infuse Ventures’ entire corpus is likely to be deployed by year end, after which the Bharat Innovation Fund will kick into play, as per DealStreetAsia report.

CIIE is the fund manager for the entrepreneurship centre at Ahmedabad. It will shortly start raising the Bharat Fund.

Infuse has invested in firms like Internet of Things startup Altizon Systems Pvt. Ltd (in which Wipro Ventures Ltd recently invested), energy management startup Ecolibrium Energy Pvt. Ltd, and recycling firm Karma Recycling Pvt. Ltd. “Infuse has made 14 investments so far, including one company that has shut down. We have deployed more than 90 per cent of our first fund and are reserving the remainder for follow-on or bridge funding into our own companies this year,” Kunal Upadhyay, CEO, Infuse Ventures said. “New investments will be out of Bharat and Infuse will only support existing portfolio companies.”

Infuse Ventures’ investments are equity-linked structures, with the attempt to syndicate deals or bring in other angels or investors who are interested in the space. Typically the investments ranges between Rs 1- 10 crore. Infuse also helps its portfolio companies raise debt, and four of its investors are banks.

“Infuse is mandated to invest in entities incorporated in India and predominantly serving the Indian market. But we are very interested in sourcing technologies developed elsewhere that may have a large opportunity in India,” Upadhyay said while commenting on whether Infuse would be interested in overseas companies.

Other clean tech areas that CIIE is looking at is rooftop solar and solar as a service, along with water-tech. “There is significant resource efficiency potential in both these sectors, and it is possible for new business models to exploit this potential,” Kunal added.
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