Top executives from fintech startup Razorpay, including co-founders Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, have announced the launch of MarsShot Ventures, an investment fund focused on India's early-stage startups.

According to Mathur, who also serves as the firm's chief executive, the fund has made about 15 investments in businesses across sectors, largely in seed and pre-series A rounds. BimaPe, UrbanPiper, and Hashnode are among the startups in its portfolio.

“We have witnessed a lot of action in India's startup scene in the previous year, and many startups seek out us (the Razorpay team) for guidance,” Mathur added. We assist with money for the companies that we find intriguing. In our own capacity, these are usually angel investments”.

The fund is now on the lookout for a ‘investment manager' to oversee day-to-day operations. Now that we have 15 businesses in our portfolio, the size of our investments has expanded, and we believe it is time to formalise this venture,” Mathur added.

The fund currently has eight ‘operators,' all of them are Razorpay top executives.

Other members include Arpit Chugh, the startup's chief financial officer, as well as Ayush Bansal, Chetty Arun, Shashank Mehta, Sagar Saxena, and Vishnu Acharya, who is claimed to be managing the company unofficially.

The fund's size and goal corpus were not disclosed by Mathur.

According to him, the venture is not a subsidiary of Razorpay and operates independently.

Nithin and Nikhil Kamath, co-founders of Zerodha, have also started True Beacon, a similar investment vehicle.

“As Razorpay grew from nothing to $3 billion in revenue, we accumulated experience that we feel can be shared with new entrepreneurs just getting started. It's a side job to which we've all contributed,” Mathur explained.

After funding $160 million from Sequoia India and Singapore-based GIC in April, the startup's worth nearly tripled to three billion dollars. Ribbit Capital and Matrix Partners were among the other previous investors in the round. After Paytm and PhonePe, Razorpay is now one of India's most valuable financial businesses.

Mathur on the other hand, just became a registered investment partner after partnering with Ribbit Capital in the firm's sixth India-focused corpus, according to him.

Several renowned Indian fintech founders and CEOs, like Kunal Shah of Cred, Amrish Rau of Pine Labs, Vijay Shekhar Sharma of Paytm, and Nithin Kamath of Nithin Kamath, are active angel investors in the country's expanding startup ecosystem.