Cornerstone Ventures to raise $200 million in its second fund by 2025 end

Through its second fund, the company aims to focus on companies operating in the domains including agentic AI, quantum tech, and Web3

Cornerstone Ventures, a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-focused venture capital firm, aims to raise $200 million for its second fund by the end of 2025. It had its first close at approximately $40 million in January this year. Since then, the firm has raised nearly $55 million and made one investment. The fund was initially launched in mid-2024.

 

"We are excited about where the B2B enterprise tech space is going over the next 5–10 years. On the progress, we did our first close of about $40 million and have added another $20–$30 million. Hopefully, by April end, we'll touch the $70–$75 million mark," said Abhishek Prasad, managing director at Cornerstone Ventures.

 

To bring in the capital, the firm is working with several Indian banks, including the State Bank of India, and global institutions in the United States, Japan, Korea, and Australia.

 

While sharing the focus areas of the fund, he said, "We have over 7 million tech workers in India who are capable of building enterprise applications. Applied AI is the next big area in our fund. The two other areas are quantum, because the shift from binary to quantum is real, and Web3, which is built for enterprises." The ongoing fund targets next-generation enterprise technologies.

 

For the second fund, Cornerstone Ventures is adopting a 70:30 allocation strategy, where 70 per cent of the funds will flow into Series A and Series B investments; the remaining 30 per cent will be allocated to companies that are one to three years away from their IPO, Prasad said.

 

Prasad said the firm would make around 15–18 transactions from this fund in all new companies. In its existing portfolio, it might invest around 10 per cent of this overall corpus.

 

"In the early stage, we will do between $3–$7 million cheques. And again, winners can get an additional $7–$10 million because we want a very concentrated portfolio of 10 companies there. In the late stage, there will be single cheques between $10–$15 million each to five companies. In this, maybe three to four existing portfolio companies might get some top-ups," he added.

 

The corpus of the firm's first fund was $50 million, through which it built a portfolio of 21 companies, including logistics solutions firm Blubirch, preventive healthcare platform Watch Your Health, and carbon footprint calculation platform Olivegaea, among others. In the meantime, it exited three companies.