Avendus, India’s main enterprise capital funding financial institution, confirmed on Wednesday that it’s seeking to elevate as much as $350 million for its new personal fairness fund.
The brand new fund, known as Future Leaders Fund III, will enable the Mumbai-headquartered agency to jot down larger checks and keep a major place within the startups it backs, managing companion Ritesh Chandra instructed TechCrunch. In early April, TechCrunch reported that Avendus plans to lift a brand new fund.
Avendus has established itself as India’s largest startup enterprise capital advisor, a daily a part of most progress stage offers within the nation. It dealt with greater than 30 offers final 12 months, together with mergers and acquisitions, in accordance with Enterprise Intelligence, a non-public market evaluation platform. The expansion within the dimension of the personal fairness division underscores the agency’s ambitions to sink its tentacles even deeper into the ecosystem and reap extra advantages from the positive factors.
The agency’s rise to prominence was helped by the truth that lots of its big-name world opponents, reminiscent of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan, initially paid much less consideration to the Indian market, permitting Avendus to achieve a foothold and construct relationships with the nation’s rising know-how entrepreneurs.
The connection additionally helps the agency’s personal fairness arm achieve entry to some high-profile offers. For instance, monetary providers startups Juspay and Zeta largely solely enable Avendus, aside from SoftBank, which is the primary backer. “These are companies which have come out of {our relationships} and networks,” Chandra mentioned.
The personal fairness arm of Avendus, whose portfolio contains Delhivery, Lenskart, Licious, VerSe Innovation, Xpressbees and the Nationwide Inventory Change, has additionally earned a popularity for delivering large exits to its backers on time. LensKart and the Nationwide Inventory Change, for instance, have put in 4 instances the sum of money Avendus has invested in over 4 years of funding.
“The life cycle of our fund is 5 to 6 years. The issue with the Indian startup ecosystem is that buyers have poured in a variety of capital however do not see a lot return over a protracted time period. We’re targeted on getting our a reimbursement,” he mentioned.
Regardless of the rising pattern of tech startups going public in India, a phenomenon that was uncommon simply 4 years in the past, buyers can’t depend on IPOs alone to generate income. In line with Chandra, Avendus has constructed relationships that enable the corporate to exit its positions by promoting stakes to late-stage buyers reminiscent of sovereign wealth funds, offering another path to income aside from an IPO.