The Fundamentum Partnership, founded by Nandan Nilekani and Sanjeev Aggarwal in 2017, has successfully launched Fundamentum Partnership Fund III with a target of ₹2,200 crore ($230 million), including a ₹400 crore greenshoe option. According to reports from The Times of India, Nilekani will anchor the fund as a limited partner (LP), marking his largest commitment to any venture capital firm. The fund will be managed by Sanjeev Aggarwal, Prateek Jain, Mayank Kachhwaha, and Chief Financial Officer Sanjay Chaturvedi, with Jain and Chaturvedi having been with Fundamentum since its launch and Kachhwaha joining during Fund II to build the firm's fintech investment practice. Mayank Kachhwaha, general partner at Fundamentum, told TOI that "India's Series B moment is now" as the expansion of the early-stage funding ecosystem has created a much larger pipeline of companies ready for growth capital. Speaking to Fortune India, co-founder Sanjeev Aggarwal confirmed that while the first close is expected in six months, there is already significant interest from both global limited partners and domestic entrepreneurs in the fund raise.
As reported by The Times of India, Fund III will continue the firm's strategy of backing startups that have achieved product-market fit and are preparing to scale. The fund will write initial cheques of ₹100-150 crore on average and typically seek 10-15% ownership in portfolio companies. About 80% of the fund will be invested in consumer technology and fintech, with Fund III specifically targeting digital commerce, content, healthcare and education technology in consumer tech, and credit, wealth management, insurance and financial infrastructure in fintech. Around 60% of the corpus will be deployed as initial investments, while the remaining 40% will be reserved for follow-on rounds. The firm expects to make 8 to 10 investments from the new fund, with the first close expected within the next three to six months. Fund III will be broadly similar in size and strategy to Fund II, with the firm continuing its approach of backing a smaller number of companies with larger investment sizes. According to Fortune India, the deployment focus of the third fund, especially around AI businesses, would be in those companies that serve domestic consumption and AI services serving global enterprises. Aggarwal emphasized that "Our belief is that it will be a vertical SLM (small language model) play for India specific problems, people will write their own micro models. So, India would be a very good vertical SLM factory. The other thing is that this is the next 400 million Internet users, where AI would be providing access, interface, through vernacular and voice-based feature offering."
According to The Times of India reports, Fundamentum is bullish on AI initially disrupting content and content generation, citing their investment in IPO-bound Kuku FM from Fund II. The firm believes AI will materially change how people interact with commerce, with transformational impact on services provided through edge devices like smartphones. On fintech, the firm believes the underlying digital public infrastructure has reached maturity needed for AI expansion, particularly in wealth management and insurance infrastructure. Wealth tech is alive, banking infrastructure is alive, credit is alive... I feel fintech is more alive than ever because the firm can now address the next 400 million users meaningfully after iterating on the first 100 million for over a decade. Fund III will focus on consumer technology, fintech, and AI-native or AI-enabled businesses, with about 80% of Fund III likely to be deployed in consumer and fintech startups, while the remaining 10-20% will go towards AI-native companies and AI-led services businesses. The firm will continue to avoid highly capital-intensive sectors and looks for businesses with strong customer affinity, product-market fit, defensible business models, healthy unit economics and a clear path to profitability. Aggarwal noted that "India also has the potential to become the FDE (forward deployed engineer) factory for the world. We have a very good advantage because we have a very strong local industry on which we can train our people and models and then export it globally."
As reported by The Times of India, Fund II has delivered a gross internal rate of return of 26% with portfolio companies recording average growth of 123% over the past year. The firm's portfolio includes several fast-growing companies, with Kuku achieving more than 400 million downloads and 10 million paid subscribers, Spinny generating more than ₹4,600 crore in revenue in FY25, and Stable Money growing assets under management to more than ₹6,000 crore, more than tripling since Fundamentum invested in 2025. Other notable portfolio companies include PharmEasy becoming a major digital healthcare platform and AppsForBharat's Sri Mandir surpassing 40 million downloads. The firm's portfolio also includes Spinny, PharmEasy, Kuku, AppsForBharat, ApnaMart, FlexiLoans, Stable Money, TransBnk, Olyv and ProcMart. Since launching its first fund in 2017, Fundamentum has invested in 17 technology companies across consumer internet, fintech, B2B commerce, enterprise software and other emerging sectors in India. According to The Times of India, the firm follows a concentrated investment strategy, typically backing four to five startups each year while taking board seats and partnering with founders through the scale-up journey.
As reported by The Times of India, Fund I, which started with just $90 million, is expected to deliver outsized returns as it nears the end of its lifecycle. The firm has already returned about 60% of the capital raised from Fund I, with marquee investments including Spinny, Probo, and Pharmeasy. Fund II currently has a gross internal rate of return of 26% with portfolio companies recording average growth of 123% over the past year. The general partners declined to disclose Fund I's internal rate of return, stating it was 'tracking on the right side' as it moves through the distribution cycle. The new fund is also looking to bring in international investors through GIFT City to expand its investment capabilities. Fundamentum has also launched F2A, a separate AI and deeptech-focused investment platform, with Kachhwaha noting that any overlap between Fund III and F2A in AI investments would be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Speaking to Fortune India, Aggarwal shared insights on the recent new-age tech IPOs, noting that "I think now we have learnt that you have to price assets very, very carefully and there is more discipline. Even the public market investors, especially the institutions who build the book, are now very tight on valuations. Hopefully you will see that this mispricing is getting corrected."
