Avendus, India’s largest enterprise capital funding financial institution, confirmed on Wednesday that it plans to boost as much as $350 million for its new personal fairness fund.
Managing associate Ritesh Chandra instructed TechCrunch that the brand new fund, referred to as Future Leaders Fund III, will permit the Mumbai-based agency to put in writing larger checks and spend money on the startups it backs. keep a significant place. TechCrunch reported in early April that Avendus was growing a plan to boost a brand new fund.
Avendus has turn into India’s largest enterprise capital advisor to new startups and is a daily fixture in most development stage offers within the nation. The agency supplied providers on greater than 30 transactions final yr, together with mergers and acquisitions, in response to personal market insights platform Enterprise Intelligence. The rising dimension of its personal fairness arm underscores the corporate’s ambition to plant its tentacles deeper into the ecosystem and seize extra income.
The corporate’s rise has been aided by many well-known international rivals equivalent to Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase initially paying much less consideration to the Indian market, permitting Avendus to achieve a foothold and construct relationships with the nation’s booming Tech entrepreneurs collectively.
The connection has additionally helped the agency’s personal fairness arm land some high-profile offers. For instance, monetary providers startups Juspay and Zeta primarily solely permit Avendus, aside from main backer SoftBank, into their shareholding constructions. “These companies come from {our relationships} and networks,” says Chandra.
Avendus’ personal fairness arm, whose portfolio contains Delhivery, Lenskart, Licious, VerSe Innovation, Xpressbees and Nationwide Inventory Trade, has additionally earned a popularity for offering well timed and substantial exits to its backers. For instance, each LensKart and Nationwide Inventory Trade delivered 4 instances the quantity Avendus invested in 4 years.
“The life cycle of our fund is 5 to 6 years. One of many issues with the Indian startup ecosystem is that traders make investments some huge cash however don’t see a lot return over an extended time period. Our focus is how one can get our a reimbursement cash,” he stated.
Whereas there’s a rising development of Indian tech startups going public – a phenomenon that was not frequent 4 years in the past – traders can’t rely solely on IPOs to generate returns. Avendus has developed relationships that permit the corporate to exit its positions by promoting shares to later-stage traders equivalent to sovereign traders, offering a substitute for an IPO to generate returns, Chandra stated.
