Novastar Partners backs AJVC in debut LP-style investment
Novastar Partners, an India-focused private markets investment platform, has made its first limited partner-style commitment by investing in early-stage venture capital fund A Junior VC (AJVC). The move marks a key milestone for Novastar as it scales its presence across India’s venture and private equity landscape.
The commitment aligns with Novastar’s plan to assemble a diversified portfolio of venture capital and private equity funds that target technology and technology-enabled businesses. Alongside fund commitments, Novastar also intends to pursue selective direct investments in private companies, giving its own investors curated access to a broad swath of India’s innovation economy, including AJVC’s pipeline and portfolio of pre-seed startups.
AJVC, founded by Aviral Bhatnagar, manages a corpus of roughly Rs 165 crore and concentrates on pre-seed investments across artificial intelligence, healthcare, deeptech, consumer technology, and emerging consumer brands. The fund has already backed more than 35 companies and plans to invest in over 85 startups through the life of the fund, following a high-velocity, programmatic approach to company creation at the earliest stages.
Novastar’s founder and managing partner, Dhruv Jhunjhunwala, emphasized that a systematic, programmatic investing model—built on the understanding that a small number of breakout winners can drive the lion’s share of returns—is particularly well-suited to India’s expanding startup ecosystem. According to Jhunjhunwala, AJVC’s disciplined approach and Bhatnagar’s deep connections with early-stage founders made the fund an especially compelling partner for Novastar’s platform strategy.
Bhatnagar launched AJVC after nearly a decade of early-stage investing, including experience at Venture Highway, and has since built a network that spans founders, operators, and sector specialists across the Indian startup community. This network, paired with AJVC’s focus on pre-seed opportunities across frontier and fast-scaling sectors, has helped the fund source and support promising companies at their most formative stages.
Novastar itself is building an India-centric private markets platform through a combination of commitments to VC and PE funds and targeted direct investments in technology and tech-enabled enterprises. The investment in AJVC underscores Novastar’s thesis of partnering with managers who employ differentiated strategies tailored to India’s dynamic market and who can systematically access and nurture early outliers.
By anchoring capital with AJVC, Novastar adds exposure to a broad pipeline of pre-seed opportunities, reinforces its fund-of-funds capabilities, and advances its goal of providing investors access to a curated mix of managers and companies shaping the next wave of technology-led growth in India.
