Applied Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) & IoT-focused early-stage venture fund pi Ventures announced the first close of their maiden fund at $13 million.

pi Ventures, a $30 million fund, is expected to make the final close within this year. Its Limited Partners (LPs) include SIDBI, India’s top lender for small businesses; prominent family offices from the US, Canada, Singapore and India; and leading entrepreneurs like Mohandas Pai, Binny Bansal, Deep Kalra, Sanjeev Bikchandani and Bhupen Shah, among others.

Co-founded by Manish Singhal and Umakant Soni, pi Ventures invests in early-stage startups that focus on solving problems in healthcare, logistics, retail, fintech and enterprise sectors using AI, ML and IoT. The VC fund plans to invest in 18-20 startups from this fund over the next three to four years.

Manish Singhal, Founding Partner, pi Ventures, said: “India is the dark horse in the AI race given it has lot of data, brilliant data science talent and early adoption environment due to broken processes and we are happy to play a part in helping India leapfrog with AI. We are thankful to our early backers, investors and founders who have chosen to work with us. We are very excited to play a role in building a strong AI based product ecosystem in India.”

pi Ventures has made three investments so far in the healthcare and energy-efficiency space, namely SigTuple, Zenatix and ten3T.

SigTuple is in the medical diagnostic space and is creating a deep learning-driven, cloud-based solution for detection of abnormalities and trends in medical data, for blood diagnosis.

Zenatix is a data-driven energy efficiency company that uses advanced machine learning based models and delivers 10-30% energy efficiency to large commercial consumers of electricity along with predictive insights to prevent downtown.

ten3T is in continuous monitoring of medical data like ECG in real time through its own smart patches to enable mobile ICU for smaller hospitals.

The VC firm was started in mid2016 by Singhal and Umakant Soni, both come with rich experience in setting up, building and scaling companies. Manish was co-founder & CEO at LetsVenture and a prominent angel investor. He has rich product experience having worked with Sling Media, Ittiam Systems, and Motorola.

Soni was Director India, Science Inc & Co-founder of one of the first AI BOT company out of India, called Vimagino

The post Bangalore VC fund pi Ventures announces first close of maiden fund at $13M appeared first on Startagist.