Aum Ventures Closes Rs 225 Crore First Tranche of Rs 750 Crore Deeptech Fund, Banking on Global LPs and Indian Frontier Tech

Early-stage venture capital firm Aum Ventures has announced the first close of its India Innovation Fund II at Rs 225 crore, moving toward a target corpus of Rs 750 crore — roughly $80 million — earmarked for pre-seed and seed-stage Indian startups building intellectual-property-led technology for global markets. The Mumbai-based firm said commitments in the first close came from a mix of existing and new investors, with more than 65% originating from international limited partners spread across the United States, the Middle East and other global markets, including family offices, entrepreneurs and strategic investors.

The fund will focus on technology-intensive sectors including artificial intelligence, spacetech, semiconductors, aerospace, defence technology, robotics, energy transition and advanced manufacturing — categories where India has seen a marked acceleration in both private capital formation and public policy support over the past two years. Aum Ventures plans to write initial cheques of between $750,000 and $2 million, while reserving meaningful capital for follow-on investment through Series A and Series B rounds as portfolio companies scale.

"The successful first close of India Innovation Fund II reflects the confidence our investors have placed in our team, our investment philosophy and, most importantly, the founders we back," said Chetan Mehta, Founding Partner at Aum Ventures. "With Fund II, our ambition is to back exceptional Indian entrepreneurs from the earliest stages and help them build global companies; companies that don't just solve for India, but solve for the world. We want to play a meaningful role in taking Indian innovation from the laboratory and engineering floor to global markets."

The new fund builds on the track record of Aum's maiden vehicle, launched out of the Abu Dhabi Global Market in November 2022, which the firm says has delivered a gross multiple on invested capital of 2.23 times and a gross internal rate of return of 53%. That first fund's portfolio includes Skyroot Aerospace, which became India's first spacetech company to reach a $1 billion valuation in May 2026 after raising $60 million and completing the launch of its Vikram-1 rocket, alongside Azimuth AI, Cosmoserve Space, Sanyark Space, Sully.ai and Latent AI. Aum has also recorded an exit from robotics startup Sharang Shakti following its acquisition by LAT Aerospace.

Fund II expects to back between 25 and 30 companies over its investment lifecycle, with Aum Ventures positioning itself to offer portfolio founders access to global markets, strategic partnerships, talent and industry expertise through its network spanning India, the United States, Israel and the Middle East — support the firm argues matters particularly in deeptech categories, where commercial partnerships and defence or aerospace industry relationships can be as consequential as capital alone.

The fund arrives amid a broader wave of dedicated Indian deeptech capital formation. Shastra VC launched a $100 million deep tech and AI fund in May 2026; IIT Madras Research Park and Unicorn India Ventures jointly announced the Rs 600 crore IIT Madras Unicorn Frontier Fund I, with a further Rs 400 crore greenshoe option, targeting 25-30 frontier tech startups; and Piper Serica has raised Rs 300 crore in the first close of its own Rs 800 crore Bharat Tech Fund, focused on AI, robotics, advanced materials and space technology. That clustering of new vehicles reflects growing institutional conviction that India's deeptech ecosystem — long underfunded relative to consumer internet and fintech — is entering a genuine capital formation cycle, reinforced by government initiatives such as the Rs 1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation Fund approved in 2025.

India's Technology Development Board had, by July 2026, approved 22 RDI-linked projects with a combined project cost of Rs 4,744 crore, including Rs 2,192 crore of direct RDI support — public capital that Aum Ventures and its peers are betting will de-risk and accelerate the same categories of hard-technology startups their new funds are targeting. With Rs 225 crore secured and Rs 525 crore still to raise toward its Rs 750 crore target, Aum Ventures' ability to close Fund II on schedule will offer one signal of how deep the appetite among global LPs genuinely runs for India-focused deeptech exposure, beyond the software and consumer categories that have historically dominated the country's venture capital story.

The heavy tilt toward international limited partners in the first close — more than 65% of commitments — is itself a notable feature of this fundraise, given that Indian deeptech funds have historically leaned more heavily on domestic family offices and strategic investors, with global institutional LPs often waiting for a fund's second or third vintage before committing meaningful capital. That international investors showed up this early for Aum's second fund suggests either unusually strong conviction in the firm's specific track record — anchored by the Skyroot Aerospace outcome — or a broader recalibration among global LPs toward viewing Indian deeptech as a maturing, rather than purely speculative, asset class. Either reading would be consequential for the sector: if global capital continues flowing into India-focused hard-technology funds at the pace suggested by Aum's first close, the country's deeptech founders may find themselves with meaningfully deeper pools of early-stage capital than the two or three preceding funding cycles offered, narrowing a gap that has long been cited as one of the structural constraints on India's ability to compete with the US, China and Israel in frontier technology categories.