JSW Group gets SEBI approval for funding start-ups

Education, healthcare, financial services to be focus areas

The JSW Group announced it had got regulatory approval for financing of start-ups. JSW Ventures, venture capital arm of the group, got the permission from the Securities and Exchange Board of India, allowing it to begin investing.

The company will focus on providing early-stage funding to information technology-enabled start-ups in the education, health care, financial services, SaaS (software as a service) and enterprise software spaces. The initial corpus of Rs 100 crore would be invested over a three-year period.

The fund will be overseen by Parth Jindal, recently appointed managing director of JSW Cement. Gaurav Sachdeva is the managing partner.

"Technology innovation is happening across sectors, from old-fashioned verticals like real estate to research-driven work being done in machine learning and artificial intelligence. We think the opportunity to innovate across sectors and businesses is immense and want to be part of this transition,” stated Parth Jindal.

“As an early-stage fund, we will not only provide capital but remain strong partners of our investee companies as they grow, leveraging the group’s expertise and experience to help them blossom into world-class companies,” he added.

Over the last one year, the company has been working in the start-up ecosystem, evaluating companies building innovative products, services or technology. "We will partner with passionate entrepreneurs driven by innovation and the need to build capital-efficient businesses," added JSW Ventures Managing Partner Gaurav Sachdeva.

"We look at the team, product-market fit, scalability and technology innovation while assessing companies. Companies in e-commerce, education, healthcare, fintech, SaaS and enterprise software which provide differentiated products or service offerings are of interest to us. We typically like to lead investment rounds and work with founders helping them discover and solve business critical problems," Sachdeva said.