Avendus, India’s top venture advisor, confirms it’s looking to raise a $350 million fund

Avendus, the highest funding financial institution for enterprise offers in India, confirmed on Wednesday it’s seeking to increase as much as $350 million for its new personal fairness fund. 

The brand new fund, referred to as Future Leaders Fund III, will allow the Mumbai-headquartered agency to put in writing bigger checks and preserve a significant place within the startups it backs, stated its managing companion Ritesh Chandra in an interview with TechCrunch. TechCrunch reported in early April that Avendus was putting together a plan to raise a new fund.

A daily fixture in most growth-stage offers in India, Avendus has established itself as the most important enterprise advisor for startups within the nation. It supplied companies in over 30 offers final yr, together with merger and acquisition transactions, in response to Enterprise Intelligence, a personal market perception platform. The rising dimension of its personal fairness unit underscores the agency’s ambitions to increase its tentacles much more deeply into the ecosystem and see extra upside from the winnings.

The agency’s rise to prominence was aided by the truth that lots of its well-established world rivals, reminiscent of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JP Morgan, initially paid much less consideration to the Indian market, permitting Avendus to realize a foothold and construct relationships with the nation’s burgeoning tech entrepreneurs. 

These relationships are additionally serving to the agency’s personal fairness unit to realize entry to a number of the high-profile offers. Other than lead backer SoftBank, the monetary companies startups Juspay and Zeta have allowed solely Avendus on their cap tables, as an illustration. “These are companies that got here out of {our relationships} and networks,” stated Chandra. 

Avendus’ personal fairness unit, whose portfolio consists of Delhivery, Lenskart, Licious, VerSe Innovation, Xpressbees, and the Nationwide Inventory Trade, has additionally earned a repute for delivering giant exits to its backers in a well timed method. LensKart and the Nationwide Inventory Trade, as an illustration, each delivered 4 occasions the cash Avendus invested inside 4 years of investments.

“Our fund’s lifecycle is 5 to 6 years. An issue with the Indian startup ecosystem is that traders have poured loads of capital [into it] however don’t see returns for an extended time period. We’re targeted on how can we get our a refund,” Chandra stated.

Regardless of the rising pattern of tech startups in India going public, a phenomenon that was unusual simply 4 years in the past, traders can’t solely depend on IPOs for returns. In keeping with Chandra, Avendus has established relationships that allow the corporate to exit its positions by promoting stakes to late-stage traders, reminiscent of sovereign traders, offering an alternate avenue for producing returns aside from IPOs.