Avataar Ventures, which invests in tech-focused business-to –business (B2B) and softeware-as-a-service (SaaS) firms in the growth stage, has lifted up an additional $100 million in its Opportunities Fund as B2B start-ups gain more reputation.

Three large institutional investors from Europe and the US have invested in the new fund, which was introduced by Silicon Valley investor Norwest’s  executive director Mohan Kumar and former Linkedin India head Nishant Rao. Global private equity major HarbourVest Partners, which was the only investor in Avataar's maiden fund of $300 million, has also contributed in this fund.

The Opportunities Fund will be used for strategic top-up investments in its best performing bets from the current portfolio as well as to make new bets in India and the US. Kumar, who has unicorns (start-ups valiuedat $1 Billion or more) like Zenoti in his portfolio, that Avataar has also made two new investments – series B in Sense HQ ( an AI-powered talent management solution for the gig workforce) and series C in RateGain ( a travel & hospitlity SaaS provider).

The investment scale as not revealed, but Avataar typically invests between $10-30 million in a startup.

“We have raised the new fund in little over 12 months and could have gone further in terms of size of the corpus but this is a positive sign for Indian SaaS and B2B companies,” Kumar said, while adding that the whole fund  was raised virtually through Zoom calls. Avataar will also look at the health tech, fin-tech and ed-tech spaces from an enterprise perspectives in the next couple of years.

Avataar works closely with its portfolio firms in their operations and helps them particularly in M&As. Kumar and Rao  said  they are lining up around half-a- dozen senior industry executives as advisors to help these start-ups additional. Mike Mulica, a mobile and internet industry veteran, is one of the senior advisors. “We got three companies to be profitable in the last 12-18 months by working with them and helped others to accelerate sales by creating teams in the US. These interventions are unique to Avataar.” added Rao.

Avataar started its maiden fund with buying out Norwest’s stake in six atartups -- Zenoti, ElasticRun, CRMNext, Manthan, Capillary and Appnomic. The Opportunities Fund comes at a time when investors like Tiger Global, which have typically backed consumer-tech startups in India, have also stepped up their investments in the B2B space. A joint report by Zinnov and NetApp last year said 43% of Indian unicorns are B2B start-ups.