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LN Mittal family is one of the limited partners in Epiphany.

As more and more venture capital firms are shedding their early stage focus and venturing into growth investments, seed stage funding is looking attractive to some others. Epiphany Ventures, a Mumbai-based venture capital fund, has raised a $25 million fund to invest in startups across the country. The early stage fund plans to invest upto $2 million in each company but can also look at co-investing in later stage deals. 

Epiphany is headed by Gaurav Saraf and it has managed to rope in Rishi Khosla as an advisor. Khosla is the founder and CEO of financial research and analytics company Copal Partner. He also advised on Lakshmi Mittal's private equity investment in Indiabulls. With the help of Khosla, Epiphany has also roped in the Mittal family as one of its limited partners. The other LP’s include NRIs.  They closed the fund in August.

"We are a sector agnostic fund, but we will not invest in companies that are in very esoteric sectors, which require years of knowledge to understand the product," said Saraf, who has previously worked as a management consultant at Diamond Technology Partners in Chicago.  
Epiphany is doing due diligence on companies in the online, advertising, irrigation and pharmaceutical space. 

With venture capital funds adopting a cautious wait and watch approach, the new fund is not rushing into deals. In the wake of the current liquidity crunch, almost all companies are  cash strapped and looking for capital.  "Even larger companies with revenues of Rs 70-80 crore are approaching us to invest couple of million dollars or to co-invest," said Saraf.