Colruyt Group India invests INR 150M into Pavestone Technology Fund

Colruyt Group India, part of the EUR 9.9 billion Belgium-based Colruyt Group, has committed to invest INR 150 million to Pavestone Technology Fund, a SEBI registered AIF with a target Corpus of INR 900 crore. This marks the second investment for Colruyt Group India in their portfolio of VC investments after pi Ventures in 2023.

Hari Subramanian, Managing Director Colryut Group India, and Partner Korys Investments India, stated, "We are excited to partner with Pavestone Technology Fund.  India’s robust tech ecosystem, thriving start-up culture, and skilled workforce is set to drive deep tech trends leading to technological advancement, eventually contributing to economic growth and societal development. Pavestone GP are accomplished fund managers who possess a fine eye for promising start-ups. We will certainly benefit from Pavestone's deep tech experience and value creation. It is our firm belief that through these investments in deeptech, we will have a pulse on the ever-changing technological landscape that has a positive impact on our business ecosystem.”

V. Laxmikanth, Managing Partner at Pavestone, added, "We are delighted to welcome Colruyt Group India as a strategic investor. They invest heavily in-house, to accelerate the digitalization, automation, and robotization of their retail operations across their organisation. Their extensive industry experience will undoubtedly enhance our ability to pursue and capitalize on promising investment opportunities. Till date, we made four investments—E42, NewSpace Research & Technologies, LivNSense, and Bellatrix Aerospace and we look forward to work with Colruyt and make an impact on the start-up ecosystem in India".

About Colruyt Group India

Colruyt Group India is the IT engineering centre of Colruyt Group. As a technology enabler for the Group, the Indian operations cater to the diverse needs from IT Architecture to Software and System Engineering. Located in Hyderabad, the facility houses close to 800 employees equipped with diverse skills in Data Analytics, IoT, and RPA, among many others. The in-house team of technical architects, solution analysts, software engineers, and system engineers are set up as global teams that work on emerging technologies and run operations and support for the entire organization.

Colruyt Group is a Belgium-based retail corporation with a diverse portfolio of food and non-food formulas in Belgium, France, and Luxembourg with over 33000 employees.  As of FY 2021-22, it recorded an annual revenue of EUR 9.9 billion. In recent years, the Group has strongly grown to be a producer and supplier of renewable energy in Europe and India.

About Pavestone

Pavestone brings timeless investing principles to Venture capital by supporting committed innovators with smart capital to create real world value. The fund’s investment approach is finely calibrated to minimize risk and maximise returns, considering the strengths of the highly experienced management team, secular trends, sector potential, portfolio selectivity and support, and impeccable governance.

Pavestone Technology Fund is a SEBI registered AIF with a target corpus of INR 900 crore. The fund invests in companies that solve for changing business models and customer behaviour driven by exponential changes in technology like Applied and Gen AI, Immersive reality, Cloud Computing, Advanced Connectivity and Cutting-Edge Engineering (Mobility, Material Science, Bioengineering & Space). The fund also considers the secular trends like Digitalization, ESG, and Global Supply Chain realignment that drive these changes.

The fund focuses on early growth-stage firms that solve problems of large enterprises (public or private) in the B2B space. Additionally, it makes very selective investments in early-stage firms working on frontier / advanced technologies i.e. based on substantial scientific or engineering innovation.