"INDIA SHOULD SEE 300 NEW UNICORNS IN THE NEXT 8-10 YEARS"

Vikram Gupta, Founder, Ivy Cap Ventures Advisors is a seasoned investor with 25 years of experience in diverse business settings including private equity, business consulting, M&A, strategy and operations in healthcare, education as well as consumer goods. He set up India's first-ever venture capital fund for healthcare and life sciences, sponsored by Ajay Piramal in 2008. In a chat with BW Businessworld, he talks about fund deployment strategies, the tech ecosystem, India's journey to build 500 unicorns by 2030, among other things.

-  Anisha Aditya

What led to the inception of IvyCap in 2011?

In 2008-09, I was raising a $100 million fund focused on the healthcare and life sciences sector in India. At that time, amidst a market crash, I raised Rs 400 crore from 30-plus Indian institutions and individuals from which I was investing by 2009-10. As luck would have it, Piramal decided to sell their healthcare business to Abbott, which was one of the largest deals of the time. The idea of starting IvyCap Ventures got conceptualised when I met IITians while raising investment for Piramal.

Every time I met an IIT alumnus, irrespective of which IIT they were from, the connect was instant. Thereafter, I started thinking of having a platform with the IIT alumni to support the startup ecosystem. I discussed this idea with my IIT batchmates and current co-founders Ashish Wadhwani, Vishal Gauri and Anju Gupta. We decided that we would give back a substantial part of the profit to the alma maters of the investors. This gave me the opportunity to start with IvyCap Ventures in March 2011. In about 201315, IvyCap deployed its Fund-I in technology, consumer, B2B SaaS, healthcare. This philosophy which rooted IvyCap led to the foundation of India's first endowment fund at IIT Delhi. It took us about 8 years from the date of conceiving this idea to actually setting up the endowment fund in 2019, which was launched by the President of India at Rashtrapati Bhavan.