JSW Ventures, the venture capital arm of Sajjan Jindal-controlled JSW Group, will raise its second fund by next year, a top company official said.
“The second fund will seek participation from external investors and will be raised towards the end of 2018,” said Gaurav Sachdeva, managing partner, JSW Ventures, said in an interview. “The next fund will see participation from multiple investors and will be substantially larger in size but the focus will continue to remain on high growth technology-enabled businesses.”
From its first fund with a corpus of Rs100 crore, which received regulatory approval in June last year and was entirely seeded by the Jindal family, JSW Ventures has made four investments so far that include regional mobile operating system Indus OS, SaaS-based solutions provider to restaurants LimeTray; beauty products e-tailer Purplle; and refurbished and pre-owned goods marketplace Overcart.
“We have deployed almost 40% of the current fund and will continue to invest in series A and B rounds in the existing portfolio and new companies”.
For the second fund, JSW ventures will tap international investors. “As a group, we have relationships in the US, EU, China and Japan. We will leverage the relationships and build on those to raise the second fund,” Sachdeva said.
“We have not decided the corpus but the Jindal family will anchor the second fund. We have enough deal flow but the bar of capital efficiency and use of technology is fairly high for us,” Sachdeva said.
Apart from JSW Group, the prominent domestic corporate-backed venture capital firms include the RPG Group-backed RPG Ventures, which has made two investments this year so far and Nirvana Ventures backed by Patni family. PremjiInvest and Catamaran Ventures, the family investment arms of Wipro founder Azim Premji, and Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy and individual investors like Ratan Tata have been active VC investors too.
Mint reported in October that seed stage start-ups, unicorns raised a record $9.6 billion in fresh capital in the first nine months this year, which is more than double the capital raised in the same period last year.
Early-stage investments from seed to Series C saw investments worth $1.1 billion in 361 deals in the same period up 26.4% from the $870 million across 507 deals in the same period last year, Mint reported.
Source: Mint