The anchor investors in NIIF with a corpus of Rs 100 crore are Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Bharti Airtel and ICICI Knowledge Park. 

NIIF has been created with the intent of providing seed stage investments in order to promote intellectual property driven innovations in emerging technologies. The fund will also encourage entrepreneurship and enable innovative start-ups to reach a stage of self sustenance.

This fund is targeted at early stage companies with a core focus on creating intellectual property, and academicians, researchers and incubates looking to commercialise inventions. NIIF will operate as a separate entity with the fund corpus being created through voluntary institutional contributions from firms which represent the investment areas of the fund.  

Kiran Karnik, President, Nasscom said, “NIIF will focus on start-ups involved in IP creation in both IT and life-sciences and had plans for follow on rounds set to attract another Rs 150-200 cr.