Synapses to launch $125 million fund for climate, healthtech investments

Venture capital firm Synapses on Tuesday said it plans to launch a USD 125-million (about Rs 1,040 crore) fund for investments in climate and healthtech companies.

Founded by IIT alumni and veteran venture capitalists Ruchira Shukla and Karthik Chandrasekar, Synapses aims to bridge the gap between scientific ingenuity and commercialisation by backing early-stage startups leveraging STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) and IP (intellectual property) to tackle pressing climate and health challenges.

Synapses co-founder and managing partner Ruchira Shukla said that the fund will be registered with Sebi under Alternate Investment Fund Category -2 and it may take one-two years to close the entire corpus. "We will register this USD 125 million fund with Sebi under AIF-2 this month. We expect to raise it in one-two years," she said.

Shukla has earlier worked with International Finance Corporation for about 12 years, where she led the disruptive technologies business in South Asia and facilitated investments in early-stage technology businesses.

Karthik Chandrasekar, who is also a co-founder and managing partner of the company, said climatetech and healthtech solutions need to sit at the intersection of STEM-innovation and be agile as well as resilient, future-ready, infrastructure-like solutions that need to be deployed at utility scale.

"Commercialising innovations at this intersection is hard and requires deep sector immersion. We are taking on this challenge because solving for this complexity is what drives alpha and impact," he said.

According to the Climate Policy Initiative, India needs over USD 170 billion (about Rs 14.14 lakh crore) every year in climate finance to meet its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under its climate change commitment.