MUMBAI
:
After cutting larger cheques for companies such as Dezerv and Stable Money, Z47 (formerly Matrix Partners India) is seeing more opportunities in the wealth-tech segment and fintechs with a strong AI play, its managing director Vikram Vaidyanathan said.
“We are now seeing a lot of wealth-tech startups come up in India to serve the needs of different customers with the country’s population becoming more affluent,” he said in an interview on the sidelines of the Global Fintech Fest 2025.
Vaidyanathan further added that wealth is well-suited for AI play, as there is a level of consultative work, both in advising and selling, that is required. “The concept of AI-enabled human interface for such models is powerful, and we are going to see more of that.”
Investment pipeline
The venture capital firm has a steady pipeline of investments in these segments, with its ticket sizes increasing gradually over the years. “We are looking at multiple investments in wealth with many new segments emerging. Each of these segments before was not large enough to be served independently, but now we are seeing many companies with niche offerings,” he said.
Vaidyanathan explained that he follows a trust to customer acquisition cost (CAC) metric to evaluate investments in the space. “We have a trust to CAC equation that measures how a company can build financial trust with a set of customers at the right cost… whether it is something new happening on the tech side, UPI, or even AI related, there is a way of acquiring a new set of customers and building trust with them.”
The investment firm typically invests in financial services and fintech, software and AI, consumer, and advanced manufacturing with a focus on the seed, Series A, and Series B stages.
In July, Mint reported that the VC firm, which split from its US parent in 2024, is in early talks to raise its first fund, targeting a corpus of approximately $300-400 million to continue investing in Indian startups. It is also currently in talks with potential investors and is exploring partial exits from some portfolio companies to demonstrate interim liquidity.
Over the years, the VC fund has backed Indian startups across consumer and enterprise tech sectors, and its portfolio includes OneCard, Captain Fresh, Country Delight, Jupiter, MoEngage, and Zupee, among others.
It has exited investments in companies such as Avail, CreditVidya, Five Star Business Finance, ITZ Cash, Muthoot Finance, and Ola Electric through a mix of strategic sales and IPOs.
The firm is currently deploying capital from its fourth fund, which closed at $550 million in 2023, and its entry cheque sizes range between $3 million and $5 million. While it also reserves capital to double down on existing portfolio companies, some of its entry cheque sizes have grown larger with companies like Neysa, an AI cloud startup, and Finnable, an online personal loan platform, which secured about $20 million and $15 million, respectively, in their first rounds, Vaidyanathan said.