(This story originally appeared in on Oct 15, 2015)

BENGALURU: Eight high-profile women of India Inc have come together to establish an angel fund to support women-led startups.Among the eight are serial entrepreneurs Lathika Pai and Shoba Purushothaman, Sejal Gulati, MD of Time Inc India, Vaishali Kasture, former MD of Goldman Sachs, Sandhya Vasudevan, MD of Deutsche Bank India Global Services, Anju Shenoy, HR head of Visa, Dipali Shah, former board member of Pepe India, and Mimi Parthasarthy, founder of financial advisory firm Sinhasi.The fund is modelled on the lines of Golden Seeds , one of the largest angel networks in the US with five chapters ­ in New York, Boston, Silicon Valley , Southern California and Texas. It has 275 angel investors in its network, and since 2005, has invested over $70 million in more than 65 women-led companies.Pai and Gulati are in discussion with the Golden Seeds team to launch the India edition of the programme. The eight women leaders have each committed between Rs 10 lakh and Rs 25 lakh. "Three years ago, when Golden Seeds came to India to explore investment opportunities in women-led businesses, there were two challenges.The first was regulatory chal lenges related to investing in India, and the second was that there weren't enough pitches from women-led businesses," said Pai, who is also the champion of the Women in Tech programme in Nasscom.The angels have realized that sometimes women entrepreneurs were diffident and didn't know how to startup."Many of them don't have time to go out and network. So we wanted to create a platform to bring these women entrepreneurs on board," she said.Pai and team are looking to build a corpus of Rs 10 crore to begin with, that will be invested in the next 2-3 years. The fund is looking to collaborate with Saha Fund, the first Sebiapproved fund for women entrepreneurs, and which has investments from T V Mohandas Pai of Manipal Global and Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw of Biocon.