Campus Fund raises Rs 75 crore to invest in student-led startups

NEW DELHI: Campus Fund on Friday announced that it has raised Rs 75 crore to invest in student founders as it looks to deepen its commitment to student-led startups. Campus Fund has been funding Indian students over the last two years. Its notable successes range from Digantara (building google maps for space) to HealthySure (unified health insurance platform) to Expand My Business (business to business managed marketplace for digital services), among others, the fund said, adding these entities have gone on to raise follow on funding from reputed VCs.

"Campus Fund today announced its second fund to deepen its commitment to investing in student-led startups," it added. The latest fund has a corpus of Rs 75 crore. Campus Fund started with a rolling fund of Rs 7 crore in July 2020 and "is the first fund of its kind in India to employ students as investors -- who scout, evaluate and also get a seat in the decision making with regards to investments in student-led startups", according to a statement.

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Campus Fund is backed by large institutions, family offices, industry veterans and founders, including those behind Delhivery, redBus, TaxiForSure, Sheroes, and Udhyam Learning, among others. With its second corpus, Campus Fund will continue to invest at the pre-seed stage, playing the role of the first institutional check-in student-led startups and supporting them through their journey. By scouting for entrepreneurs at universities, Campus Fund identifies a more diverse range of founders than traditionally accessed by venture funding, the statement said.

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Campus Fund has a portfolio that has 40 percent non-tech founders, 30 percent female co-founders and 30 percent hardware-first tech-enabled student-led startups. Investors of Campus Fund include IIFL Wealth, HDFC Bank, Bharat Shah (Former Chairman HDFC Securities Chairman), Jaimin Bhatt (CFO Kotak Mahindra Bank), Kanwaljit Singh (founder Fireside Ventures), Shivkumar Janardhanan (Former CEO Essilor India) and others.