The new fund, Gruhas Collective Consumer Fund will look to invest around Rs 150 crore in areas such as fashion and lifestyle, health and wellness, coffee and beverages, personal care, and food services.
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“We are bringing together the technical knowhow of Bengaluru and distribution capabilities of Mumbai in a more cohesive form than has happened before. Normally, these two layers interact via intermediaries and we are trying to eliminate that,” Kamath, who is also the cofounder of Zerodha, told ET.
“If you see a lot of big brands (globally), there’s a tequila brand that has done very well, there’s a makeup brand that has done well… We’ve not seen such scale in India even though we think the world of Bollywood has permeated a lot more into the diaspora,” he said. “We see that as an eventuality here as well… We’ll have large brands come about in India, and we are positioning ourselves to take advantage of that,” Kamath added.
In addition to Gruhas and Collective Artists Network, the fund will also raise capital from limited partners.
Referring to venture funds set up by Hollywood actors such as Ashton Kutcher, who invested in tech giants like Uber, Airbnb and Snap, Vijay Subramaniam, founder and group CEO of Collective Artists Network, said that the fund would look at connecting upcoming brands with its network of artists and creators that it manages.
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“How do you make India’s Silicon Valley and Hollywood speak to each other? There’s no organised bridge and the most sustainable way to build it is via capital and network, and what can we collectively empower in the ecosystem,” Subramaniam said, adding that the new fund has already earmarked five investments.Collective Artists Network manages top Bollywood actors including Deepika Padukone, Ranveer Singh, Hrithik Roshan, and Shraddha Kapoor, in addition to several social media influencers and cricketers.
Kamath and Subramaniam will be general partners at the new fund.
“For a brand which is early, in its infancy, when they will look at making their capital efficient on the marketing side, they really cannot afford big scale media buying, or big scale communication partners. What we like to do is to get in early and power those brands with our entire creator network, to augment their influencer marketing, intellectual property (IP) in a much more scalable way,” Subramaniam said, adding that the fund would look at startups clocking Rs 50 lakh to Rs 2 crore in monthly recurring revenues.
Commenting on the trend of more investments going into the consumer space lately, Kamath said that because of the increased cost of capital, domestically, there are more opportunities available at a reasonable valuation today than there were a few years ago.
“We saw this in China… When they went through $5,000 gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, consumption shot up. So, we are buying into the larger India story and are betting that India will get there at some point of time,” Kamath said.
Gruhas specialises in early-stage and debt investments in sectors including proptech, clean tech, and consumer sector, among others. It has backed startups such as Licious, Mainstreet Marketplace, Printo and Hatti Kaapi in the consumer space.
The firm has also partnered with DLF Family Office and Anthill Ventures for an accelerator programme named Gruhas Aspire in the proptech space.