Andreessen Horowitz, which first invested in India last year, is looking to break into the world’s second-largest internet market.
The Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm has set aside around $500 million to back Indian startups, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
The company, led the funding round in the Bengaluru-based crypto exchange CoinSwitch Kuber last yearare also looking to hire for a number of domestic investment roles, people familiar with the matter said.
Several partners at the company including Seema Amble and Sumeet Singh have engaged with a number of Indian startups in recent months, people familiar with the matter said, requesting anonymity because of the matter. is private.
Company – in January said they have raised $9 billion in venture, growth and bio-funds — is exploring investment in an Indian startup operating an opinion-sharing platform with a valuation of around $250 million, one person said. It has also engaged with an early-stage fintech based in Bengaluru, another said.
If the company, commonly known as a16z, goes ahead with plans, it will be the latest prominent investor to enter actively into India. It did not respond to a request for comment on Friday.
The company has been exploring markets like India for many years. During a talk at Stanford Graduate School of Business five years ago, a16z co-founder and general partner Marc Andreessen (pictured above) talked about supporting startups in emerging markets is “extremely attractive”. However, it is also challenging for a venture fund to expand to more countries, he explained. Venture capital is a “hands-on process of understanding the people you are working with to evaluate the company and work with it”.
“If I keep doing business like that, then there’s the issue of geographic remoteness, which is if I’m not in another geography, do I really know those people to make decisions about. So what many companies have been trying to do is local staff. But then there’s the fundamental problem that if the local team is really good, they can easily leave and run their own company. If they’re bad, they’ll keep working for me… this has its own problems. ”
Scores of companies, including Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, Insight Partners, Dragoneer, D1 and Bodhi Tree have accelerated their investments in the world’s second most populous country in recent years.
Several of their peers/competitors, including Sequoia, Lightspeed and Accel, which have been active in India for more than a decade, have raised new country-specific funds in recent months or are in the process new fund raising process. Lightspeed India joint venture partners are looking for ways raised over $500 million for India’s fourth fundTechCrunch reported last week.
SoftBank, Alpha Wave Global and Tiger Global have also significantly more than doubled for India in recent quarters. SoftBank alone invested more than 3 billion dollars in Indian startups last year and plans to invest up to $10 billion this year, it said. Tiger Global has helped mint nearly two dozen unicorns in India over the past 18 months.
On the web3 front, many investors, including Coinbase Ventures, Sino Global, Hashed, and FTX Ventures, have engaged with multiple startups in the country in recent weeks, according to people familiar with the matter.
