SEVA – a newly launched growth equity firm serving customer-centric founders and companies based in New York – recently announced the closing of its $85 million oversubscribed debut fund (SEVA Fund I), reaching its hard cap and exceeding its original target of $50 million. The fund’s closing follows just four months of fundraising amidst a historically challenging environment and received broad support from a leading group of limited partners comprised of world-class bootstrapped founder/CEOs, industry leaders, and blue-chip institutional investors, including leading university endowments, charitable foundations, investment managers, and family offices.
SEVA will seek to build a focused portfolio of eight to ten investments in fast-growing, profitable, and founder-led technology companies. And the firm will target companies that have achieved strong product-market fit, exhibit robust customer loyalty, and are looking to scale and accelerate their long-term growth and profitability.
Founded by Shalin Mehta (formerly of Susquehanna Growth Equity and Spectrum Equity), who built his career by sourcing, leading, and managing proprietary investments in leading founder-led technology companies. And SEVA brings a unique perspective to its partnership approach, combining flexible capital with empathy and strategic expertise for customer-centric founders and companies focused on profitable growth. Before founding SEVA this year, Mehta supported leading companies across the internet, software, data, marketplace, and technology-enabled services categories, like Clutch.co, ProviderTrust, Seek Now, NoRedInk, Poppulo, and Muck Rack.
SEVA (a name inspired by the Sanskrit word, which means selfless service) will seek to serve customer-centric founders of fast-growing, bootstrapped companies to scale via profitable growth and achieve their vision on their terms.
SEVA also cultivated an extensive network of bootstrapped founders and operational leaders who have built world-class customer-centric companies through profitable growth. And SEVA’s Network is a community of world-class founders and growth-stage technology executives across key functions with experience solving today’s high-growth initiatives. The SEVA Network is bringing its unique perspective to partner with SEVA’s founders to help them scale and accelerate long-term growth and profitability via sharing best practices and expertise across Strategic Planning, Executive Hiring, Product/GTM, Financial Reporting & Operational Infrastructure, and Exit Planning.
KEY QUOTES:
“SEVA’s purpose is simple: to serve customer-centric founders and companies. SEVA realizes its distinct purpose through its strong thematic focus, data-centric approach, extensive bootstrapped founder network, and proprietary sourcing capability to help capital-efficient, customer-centric founders build enduring technology-enabled companies.”
“The typical VC and PE ecosystems continue to overlook and misunderstand these customer-centric founders and companies, who don’t want to subscribe to the dilutive fundraising treadmill or cede control to outside investors too early in the company’s lifecycle – we’ve built SEVA to solve this quandary, by offering a balanced and optimal partnership to enable capital-efficient, customer-centric founders to have the best of both worlds.”
— Shalin Mehta, Founder and Managing Partner of SEVA
