Nilekani-backed F2A expands AI, deep-tech fund size to ₹3,500 crore
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Fundamentum Frontier Advisors (F2A), the investment platform led by Ashish Kumar, has expanded the size of its growth-stage artificial intelligence (AI) and deep-tech fund from ₹3,000 crore to ₹3,500 crore following investor interest.
Launched earlier this year, F2A is led by Ashish Kumar, co-founder of Fundamentum, the venture capital firm he established with Nandan Nilekani. The platform focuses on AI and deep-tech startups.
F2A has received approval from its limited partners (LPs) to increase the fund size by ₹500 crore to accommodate additional investor demand. Nilekani is the fund's anchor investor and will also act as a mentor to F2A.
Speaking to Fortune India, Kumar, general partner at F2A, said the fund would invest across the AI value chain, including companies working on AI hardware, software and applications. The fund is backed largely by domestic investors.
“Bulk of our deployment will be in the physical AI company, which will basically be the deep tech, the semiconductors, advanced materials, robotics and the space tech, which will be around 40%. The other 40% will be the digital consumer companies leveraging AI, and then 20% will be on the enterprise set of tools, which will have frontier models, databases, analytics and the like,” Kumar said.
Kumar co-founded Fundamentum with Nilekani in 2017. He said Nilekani's backing and understanding of the AI value chain would help F2A identify investment opportunities and provide access to his expertise.
F2A plans to invest across AI and deep-tech businesses over the next two to three years. The fund has already identified three companies in which it expects to close investments over the next three months.
“We have already identified three companies that we will be closing in the next three months. Two of the companies are in deep-tech infrastructure. One is on the edge AI platform, and the other is around the inferencing layer for a particular value proposition. The third company is in the enterprise AI suite,” Kumar said.