Creaegis Research
Investment Thesis
Creaegis Investment Management is a Bengaluru, India-headquartered growth-equity and private equity firm founded in 2018 by Prakash Parthasarathy, the former founding Managing Partner & Chief Investment Officer of PremjiInvest. The firm's stated mission is to back founders who are transforming industries and building durable institutions, pairing strategic institutional equity with hands-on operational capabilities. Creaegis positions itself as a bridge between global development finance / sovereign capital pools and high-potential Indian digital, consumer, and enterprise ecosystems, aiming to be an institutional-grade partner for mid-cap, high-growth companies rather than an early-stage venture shop.
Stage Focus
Creaegis is a growth-stage investor, concentrating on Series B and Series C rounds. It rarely, if ever, participates at pre-seed or seed. The firm's stated goal is to build a concentrated portfolio of 12-15 companies per fund, initiating roughly four new platform investments per year, then reserving capital for follow-ons as portfolio companies scale.
Check Size
Creaegis has publicly stated it intends to invest between $25M and $40M per company from Fund I. Deal data shows realized check sizes clustering higher in practice — average disclosed round participation of roughly $36.7M at Series B and $55.1M at Series C — consistent with a firm that leads large structured growth rounds (often combining equity and debt, as in the Zolve deal) rather than writing small minority checks.
Lead Tendency
Creaegis leads the large majority of its disclosed rounds — GIVA, Zolve, Haber, Doceree, and Emergent were all Creaegis-led rounds — indicating the firm typically anchors pricing and terms and syndicates around itself rather than following other leads.
Recent Activity
Creaegis closed its debut fund (Fund I) at $425-426M in September 2023, reportedly the largest maiden fund ever raised by a first-time India-focused fund manager, with institutional backing including the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and family offices across India, the US, Europe, and Asia. The firm has since been reported to be targeting a larger, roughly $500M vehicle. Deployment has been steady and active: a $35M Series B into Doceree in September 2023, a $38-44M Series C into industrial-automation startup Haber in October 2024, a $251M Series B (comprising $51M equity + $200M debt) into cross-border neobank Zolve in March 2025, a ~$53-62M Series C into D2C jewellery brand GIVA in June 2025, and, most recently, leading a $130M Series C into AI coding platform Emergent in July 2026 that made Emergent a unicorn at a $1.5B valuation roughly a year after its public launch. The Emergent deal signals an expanding appetite for AI-native software companies alongside the firm's traditional consumer, fintech, and industrial focus.
Portfolio Highlights
Creaegis has made roughly 9-11 disclosed investments since inception. Notable names include GIVA (D2C silver/lab-grown-diamond jewellery), Zolve (cross-border neobank for immigrants, valued near $800M), Doceree (physician-targeted digital health marketing platform), Medikabazaar (B2B healthtech/medical-supplies marketplace), Kale Logistics Solutions (cloud-based cargo community and logistics software, serving Fortune 500 clients across 40 countries), Onsurity (employee health-insurance/insurtech platform), Haber (AI-driven industrial robotics and water/process optimization), and Emergent (agentic AI app-building platform, YC-backed, reached unicorn status in about a year). Zopper (insurtech/POS) also appears in the portfolio, though a widely-cited 2018 PhonePe acquisition of a company also named "Zopper Retail" predates Creaegis's fund and could not be confidently attributed to this Creaegis investment, so it has not been logged as a Creaegis exit event.
Team
- Prakash Parthasarathy — Founder, Managing Partner & Chief Investment Officer. Previously founding Managing Partner & CIO of PremjiInvest (joined 2006), where he was responsible for strategy and operations across all asset classes in India, China, and the US.
- Sambasivam Kailasam — Partner. Previously at Premji Invest and iGATE Global Solutions; qualified as a Chartered Accountant (ICAI).
- Nitish Bandi — Partner. Previously at Premji Invest, Martin Wolf Securities, and Williams Capital Advisors.
- Pramila Venkat — Chief of Staff.
- Todd St Sure — Director, Business Development & Portfolio Operations.
The team's heavy PremjiInvest lineage (three of the firm's senior team came from Azim Premji's family office investment arm) is a defining characteristic — Creaegis is effectively a PremjiInvest-alumni spinout applying that firm's growth-equity playbook as an independent vehicle.
Decision Process
With multiple named partners (Parthasarathy, Kailasam, Bandi) driving deal leadership across different investments, Creaegis appears to operate as a partnership rather than a solo-GP structure, though Prakash Parthasarathy as founder/CIO likely holds outsized influence on final investment decisions.
Founder Preferences
Creaegis backs founders who are "transforming industries and building great institutions" — language suggesting a preference for ambitious, category-defining businesses over incremental plays. Portfolio composition (jewellery D2C, neobanking, health marketing, logistics SaaS, industrial robotics, AI app-building) shows a strong bias toward capital-efficient, revenue-generating businesses at the inflection point between product-market fit and category leadership, rather than pre-revenue or purely technical bets.
Geographic Focus
Predominantly India (Bengaluru HQ, ~8 of 9-11 disclosed investments are India-headquartered companies), with selective cross-border exposure to India-founded, globally-operating businesses (Zolve is Houston-based; Emergent has a San Francisco presence). The firm also lists a Singapore office (1 Fullerton Road, One Fullerton), suggesting an intent to serve as a bridge for regional and global capital into the Indian market rather than to invest broadly across Southeast Asia.