Kettleborough VC, founded and led by investor Nisarg Shah, has launched Fund II with a target corpus of Rs 80 crore.
The fund has already marked its first close at Rs 35 crore with commitments from family offices and entrepreneurs from India and US. It is in the process of closing the first few investments in the coming weeks.
The new vehicle will carry forward Kettleborough’s focused investment philosophy of partnering with deeply experienced founders at the point of venture inception those who bring over a decade of domain expertise, strategic relationships and execution readiness to build high-leverage businesses.
Kettleborough VC was established in 2021, its inaugural fund backed 12 startups including Zippmat, InPrime, Finhaat, Elivaas, Sumosave, Gravity, etc. and was the first institutional fund to commit to nine of them.
Speaking on the launch of Fund II, Nisarg Shah, Founder and General Partner, Kettleborough VC, said, “We are extremely disciplined about backing execution journeys only, wherein we invest only in founders for whom the venture is the natural culmination of a decade or more of expertise in a specific domain. That’s the last straw moment for us—the final convergence of market familiarity, lived experience, and deep networks. Fund I has shown a clear PMF for this thesis—tracking nearly 2x in just about 3 years from the final close—and we are now doubling down with Fund II to back about 10 more such companies.”
With Fund II, Kettleborough VC plans to write initial seed cheques of USD 300,000–USD 500,000 and further back them up with meaningful follow-on capital. The fund’s strategy is sector-agnostic but has a strong inclination towards ‘Dhandha-first’ businesses—including financial services (NBFCs, insurance, fintech infrastructure), full stack commerce solutions (B2B commerce, B2C consumer brands) and software platforms (vertical SaaS, agentic AI led platforms).
The firm expects to wrap up deployment of Fund I this quarter and has begun laying the groundwork for its first set of exits, expected over the next few quarters. Among the portfolio, several companies have raised strong follow-on rounds from marquee institutional investors such as Z47, Omnivore, Lightspeed, 3one4, Bessemer etc.
