CIIE.CO, India’s seasoned early stage startup organisation announces supporting 50 news startups over the next 12 months. CIIE.CO comes with 15+ years of lineage that has had unparalleled focus on early stage startups. The new investments would be sector agnostic with a focus on three core themes of deep tech, digitisation and sustainability. Since inception they have coached more than 5000 entrepreneurs, accelerated over 1200 startups and invested in 350 startups. In 2022 alone, CIIE.CO deployed catalytic capital in 70 pre-seed and seed stage startups, after evaluating over 1500 deals.
CIIE.CO has a proven track record of accelerating entrepreneurs’ venture building journey and comes on board as an active investor helping founders navigate the valley of death via holistic strategic support. The organisation was the first institutional investor for almost 90% of the startups and about two-third of these startups came from tier 2 and tier 3 cities of India. CIIE.CO’s portfolio cumulatively raised over $50M in follow-on funding in 2022 alone.
Commenting on the announcement, Vipul Patel, Partner, Seed Investing, highlighted “Over the next 12 months, we are committed to investing upto $100k each in 50 early-stage startups. We aim to continue to build our deep-tech portfolio across some of the exciting white-spaces including digital therapeutics and diagnostic-pathology in the health-tech segment. We are also looking at investing in breakthrough-solutions enabling decarbonisation, and enterprise-grade solutions powered by generative AI, amongst others.”
With a knack of backing startups early, CIIE.CO has found its success in companies it supported early on. Biosense, for example, a pre product investment of CIIE.CO back in 2009 resulted into one of the most successful acquisitions in the medical device space by US-based clinical diagnostics major PerkinElmer. While medical devices are known to be a challenging sector in India, otherwise. Another lesser known space to investors before 2019 was Aerospace, when CIIE.CO had started to build its space-tech portfolio. Today, Agnikul, another CIIE.CO portfolio company is reckoned as one of India’s top space tech startups, having raised more than $30 M. CIIE.CO had also invested early in IdeaForge, India’s biggest dronetech startup that announced going public recently. CIIE.CO has seen its portfolio garner more than $250 M over all from external investors.
“We are also excited about investing in sectors such as gaming and the creator economy that cater to millennials and younger generations as they seek unconventional work opportunities. Having already built a strong portfolio of digital-inclusion solutions and gained insights about the users in the Bharat and SMB segment, enables us to partner with entrepreneurs in building the next generation of solutions for this segment,” Vipul added.
Equipped with key learnings and insights gained over years of experience, CIIE.CO is committed to supporting the next generation of entrepreneurs to build from India for the world.
