pi Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund that backs Artificial Intelligence and deep-tech startups, has received approval from markets regulator, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), to launch its second fund with a target corpus of Rs 565 crore. Fund II will also have a greenshoe option of Rs 185 crore. The second fund will be 2-3X larger than its first, which closed in 2017-18 and had a corpus of Rs 225 crore.

pi Ventures said it was targeting to close Fund II this fiscal year. Domestic family offices, high net-worth individuals, and entrepreneurs have evinced interest in the fund, it said. The firm said it will continue to back companies in the early-stage companies and focus beyond digital deep tech startups to space technologies, material sciences, biotech, and life sciences. It plans to back 25 startups through the fund.

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“So, the stage remains the same and the entry cheque size will also remain the same. In Fund I, we are going to back 14 companies, and in Fund II we’re likely to back 25 companies, even though the new fund is almost three times in size,” said Manish Singhal, co-founder and managing partner at pi Ventures. “This will allow us to go deeper in companies and do follow-ups at least three times and with larger cheques,” he added.