Avendus, India’s prime enterprise advisor, confirms it is seeking to elevate a $350 million fund

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

The brand new fund, referred to as Future Leaders Fund III, will allow the Mumbai-headquartered agency to write down 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 placing collectively a plan to lift a brand new fund.

Avendus has established itself as the most important enterprise advisor for startups in India, an everyday fixture in most growth-stage offers within the nation. It offered companies in over 30 offers final yr, together with merger and acquisition transactions, based on Enterprise Intelligence, a non-public market perception platform. The rising measurement of its non-public fairness unit underscores the agency’s ambitions to get its tentacles entrenched much more deeply into the ecosystem and have extra upsides on the winnings.

The agency’s rise to prominence was aided by the truth that a lot 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. 

That relationship can also be serving to the agency’s non-public fairness unit to realize entry to a number of the high-profile offers. Monetary companies startups Juspay and Zeta have largely allowed solely Avendus exterior of lead backer SoftBank on their cap tables, for example. “These are companies that got here out of {our relationships} and networks,” stated Chandra. 

Avendus’ non-public fairness unit, whose portfolio consists of Delhivery, Lenskart, Licious, VerSe Innovation, Xpressbees, and the Nationwide Inventory Alternate, has additionally earned a fame for delivering massive exits to its backers well timed. LensKart and the Nationwide Inventory Alternate, for example, each delivered 4 instances the cash Avendus invested in 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 a variety of capital however don’t see a lot returns for a protracted time frame. We’re targeted on how can we get our a refund,” he 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 not solely depend on IPOs for returns. In response to 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 another avenue for producing returns other than IPOs.