Lightspeed has raised $500 million for its latest India and Southeast Asia fund, the largest by regions, as it seeks to invest more deeply in the growing South Asian market. attract global investors.
The company said the fund, Wednesday for Lightspeed India, has been capped at $500 million, meaning it doesn’t want to raise more capital. Announces third India fund of $275 million in 2020.
Third Notice confirm TechCrunch’s April reportsays Lightspeed has initiated fundraising discussions for the new India and Southeast Asia fund and is aiming to raise around $500 million.
Lightspeed also said on Tuesday that it has raised more than $7 billion from several funds, including India and Southeast.
Lightspeed started investing in India over 10 years ago and has amassed an impressive portfolio of several fast-growing startups including Byju, India’s most valuable startup, SaaS company Innovaccer, e-commerce giant Udaan, social media company ShareChat and payments giant Razorpay.
It began investing in Southeast Asian markets over the past decade and has backed a number of startups including Ula, which has since been backed by Jeff Bezos and ride-hailing giant Grab.
Rahul Taneja said the company, which has a group of nine partners in India and Southeast Asia, is nearly doubling the size of its fund as it sees more opportunities in regions as a group of young startups is trying to tackle deeper and newer problems, says Rahul Taneja. a partner at Lightspeed, in an interview with TechCrunch.
“If you go back 15 years when India’s internet 1.0 started, we saw the emergence of business-to-commercial marketplaces of digital goods like MakeMyTrip and BookMyShow. Now, India’s Internet economy has expanded much more with a lot of new sectors and in those areas, there is a lot of depth,” he said.
“Another interesting factor that we are increasingly seeing today is the quality of entrepreneurs choosing to launch their ventures. Our belief is that today we have the opportunity to play much wider,” he added.
Like most funds, Lightspeed plummeted in the first few months after the pandemic broke out. What makes Lightspeed’s strategy interesting is that it largely declined to participate in last year’s record frenzied funding cycle.
Hemant Mohapatra, a Lightspeed partner, said in an interview with TechCrunch: “Lightspeed has been very selective about the startups we return to. “We never want to be on the list of funds that do the most trades.”
“Last year we saw very high momentum weekend deals with very, very high valuations. I would say for the most part, those deals didn’t meet our requirements and we ended up transferring those companies. Our rollout rate relative to the market over the past year and a half has been slower, he said.
Mohapatra, who has previously worked at AMD, Google and Andreessen Horowitz, said Lightspeed remains consistent with its approach and speed of trading operations and is still investing at the same pace as last year – compared to last year. current market conditions – faster.
“It is an area that we consider choosing. Over the past few years, we’ve been discussing whether we should make any changes to our strategy around the pace of investments and the type of company we’re supporting. no,” said Taneja. “I think we’ve been pretty equal and looking back on things, that looks great.”
“If we were excited about 10 companies, we would invest in all 10 of them. If we weren’t excited about any of them, we wouldn’t invest at all,” he added.
The two partners said that Lightspeed will continue to focus on areas such as consumer internet, SaaS, fintech and edtech, adding that the company is also increasingly assessing newer opportunities in areas. complements such as climate technology, cross-border payments, and web3. Lightspeed India has invested in 9 web3 startups in the past year.
This is also a period of investment opportunity agnostic. Taneja said Lightspeed India works closely with other affiliates of the company and whenever needed, the global fund sends large checks as we have seen in the case of Udaan and Razorpay.
The world’s second most populous country has attracted a lot of famous investors over the past 12 years. Sequoia and Accel, both of which have invested in the South Asian market for over 10 years, announced new funds recently.
SoftBank, Alpha Wave Global and Tiger Global have also accelerated their investments in India in recent years. SoftBank invested more than $3 billion in India last year alone. Tiger Global has invested $6.5 billion in the country so farTechCrunch reported on Monday.
