PDS Ventures

Ankur Agarwal leads the venture capital investment team as Head of VC Investment, operating from the Executive Vice Chairman’s office in London. He oversees deal sourcing, due diligence, and portfolio management for the $50 million fund. Strategic guidance comes from Pallak Seth, the group’s Executive Vice Chairman and a Harvard Business School OPM alumnus, who founded the ventures unit to align startup innovation with the parent company’s global fashion infrastructure.

The firm sources primarily through the PDS Limited platform, which manufactures for over 50 business verticals and serves major retailers including Primark, Ralph Lauren, and Hanes. This supply-chain position provides visibility into emerging material-science, sustainability, and digital commerce startups long before they appear on traditional VC radars. The ventures team also co-hosts industry events such as the Global Fashion Summit and Best of Bangladesh, which function as scouting channels for fashion-tech founders.

PDS Ventures operates a dedicated $50 million venture capital fund, with approximately $20 million already deployed across more than 55 startups and a small number of institutional fund commitments. The fund is part of PDS Limited, the publicly listed parent company, but maintains a distinct investment mandate. The firm does not publicly disclose any external limited partners, suggesting the capital is sourced from the group’s own balance sheet and promoter family resources.

The structural difference is commercial integration: portfolio companies receive access to PDS Limited’s manufacturing base in Bangladesh, Vietnam, China, and India, as well as distribution introductions to the global brands already in the parent company’s client book. This converts the ventures fund into an R&D pipeline where startups can pilot materials, test production runs, and scale commercial relationships using the parent platform’s infrastructure, rather than building their own supply chains from scratch.

The firm’s disclosure of 55-plus startups against $20 million deployed implies an average initial check size below $400,000, consistent with a broad seed-stage portfolio approach. PDS Ventures has not publicly detailed its reserve strategy or follow-on investment policy, and the fund’s structure does not appear to support large growth-stage follow-ons without leveraging the parent company’s separate balance sheet for co-investments alongside external GPs.

PDS Ventures is not a separate legal entity but the venture capital division of PDS Limited, the publicly listed Indian company that also operates 50-plus sourcing and manufacturing verticals globally. Dr. Deepak Kumar Seth and his family remain majority shareholders of the parent company. The ventures division reports through Executive Vice Chairman Pallak Seth’s office and exists alongside the group’s core manufacturing and design-sourcing businesses, not as an external or independently managed fund.

The firm targets early-stage and growth companies in fashion innovation, sustainability and circularity technologies, AI and enterprise software for manufacturing, direct-to-consumer digital brands, and consumer-product startups where the parent company’s supply-chain platform provides tangible acceleration. The fund has not published a formal negative screen or public list of excluded sectors, but the investment team’s stated mission restricts activity to categories adjacent to the PDS Limited infrastructure and retail customer base.