International Finance Corporation (IFC), the investing arm of the World Bank Group, will invest $3 million into pi Ventures, an AI and IoT-focused early stage venture fund. This is the firm’s second fund addition in this year; it had secured $13 million from a group of angel investors and HNIs. Note that the $13m fund is the first tranche of a total $30 million fund, which the company claims to close within a year. The venture firm was co-founded by Manish Singhal and Umakant Soni, and will look to in early stage start-ups that focus on solving problems in healthcare, logistics, retail, fin-tech and enterprise sectors using AI, Machines Learning, and IoT. The Bangalore-based VC firm said that it plans to invest in 18-20 start-ups over a 3-4 year time frame. As of now, pi Ventures has made four investments in the healthcare & energy space: -It had invested an undisclosed amount last month into NIRAMAI Health Analytix, a startup which uses AI and machine learning to diagnose breast cancer. -It invested an undisclosed amount into SigTuple, a medical diagnostic startup that performs diagnosis using analytics and patient history. -pi Ventures also invested around $1.18 million in IoT startup Zenatix that looks at conserving energy/electricity using predictive insights and machine learning. -Ten3T, a startup that makes wearable medical devices for real-time health monitoring had raised an undisclosed amount of funding from pi Ventures in December. On the other hand, IFC has also been investing in India in recent times. In the last year alone, IFC invested in two startups: Byju’s Learning,…
