The SaaS journey in India to witness a big leap with an initial investment of $85 Million

India’s SaaS industry could reach $1 trillion in value and create about half-million new jobs by 2030, according to a recent study by SaaSBoomi, consultancy firm McKinsey and industry trade group Nasscom.

To address the opportunity, Four high-profile entrepreneurs came together to kickstarted India’s SaaS journey, Girish Mathrubootham of Freshworks, Manav Garg of Eka Corporation, Shubham Gupta, formerly with investment firm Matrix, and Avinash Raghava, formerly with Nasscom, iSPIRT and SaaSBOOMi said it has created a venture capital fund, called Together Fund, with an initial corpus of $85 million to back young Indian startups operating in the software-as-a-service space. The company will build and help startups to scale and win customers globally and also backed about 100 such firms, are ready for their next phase of participation in the country’s startup ecosystem.

The fund has amassed a network of over 150 startup founders and investors including Krish Subramanian of Chargebee, Nishith Rastogi of Locus, Shashank ND of Practo and Kunal Shah of CRED. That underscores the reason why Together Fund was conceived, said Garg. The entire team consists of founders and other operators who have built startups and have expertise around sales strategy and global expansion, he said.

The founding team of Together Fund will continue to participate in other industry initiatives, including SaaSBOOMi, an annual flagship conference focused on SaaS startups in India, said Raghava in an interview.

“This is India’s first operator-and-founder-led fund,” he said. “The idea of creating this fund was to provide great help and opportunities to the founders along with money.”

The creation of the fund - which counts its founding team among its LPs - comes at a time when Indian startups are raising record capital as many high-profile investors double down in the world’s second-largest internet market.