South Korea based financial services firm Mirae Asset Group signals towards its growing interest in early stage Indian startups as it launches its first India dedicated fund. With a corpus of $35 million, the Mirae Asset Opportunities Fund 1 will focus on seed and Series A funding rounds for the burgeoning tech startups across India. As reported by a leading daily, Mirae Asset Group might also take the corpus of the fund up to $75 million if need be.

The India dedicated fund comes at the heels of the Mirae Asset-Naver Asia Growth Fund, which has been consistently supporting tech startups such as Ola, Bigbasket, Zomato, Shadowfax among various others since 2018. Worth $1 billion, the growth stage fund has so far invested $200 million and intends to continue its functioning under the guidance of Ashish Dave. He will also independently foresee the decision making with the Indian team for the Mirae Asset Opportunities Fund 1. The early stage and growth stage funds will continue to function independently, with investments of over $10 million coming from the growth fund said Dave.

“Our growth fund invests a minimum $10 Mn in assets due to which we missed out on a lot of early opportunities where companies wanted to raise smaller amounts. Further, since there is a global investment committee process, it takes some time to arrive at a decision. The India fund will give us flexibility to get in early in some of these deals as the decision-making is local and quick,” said Dave while speaking about the fund launch to a leading daily.

Dave also mentioned that Mirae Asset Ventures will work with some funds closely and co-invest alongside them along with the fund’s Korean partners who will continue to investing alongside Mirae.

As investments from the shores of China quiet down, the market is throwing opportunities galore for funds such as Mirae to set up a long term base in India and leverage the growing base of tech startups across the nation.

The launch of the fund reaffirms the mounting investor interest in early stage investment across the Indian startup eco-system. The last few months of 2020 saw a renewed vigor among investors to back seed stage or early stage ventures. The total seed stage capital raised in 2020 was pegged at $403 million which was almost double of the $255 million raised by early stage startups in 2019.

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