Global venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners closed a $220m fund dedicated to backing Indian founders.
The fund will focus primarily on early-stage investments, consistent with Bessemer’s approach of starting with seed and Series A investments and sticking with companies throughout their growth lifecycle with later stage investments.
Led by Vishal Gupta, Partner and Managing Director of the firm’s Bangalore office, Bessemer plans to apply its roadmap-driven investment approach to deploy the new capital over five roadmaps across consumer internet and cloud software, including marketplaces, digital health, social commerce, vertical and global SaaS.
In conjunction with its India fund, the firm added Nithin Kaimal as Chief Operating Officer of Bessemer’s Bangalore office, where he’ll oversee operations, portfolio services, and fund governance. He brings nearly 20 years of expertise across private equity, management consulting and startups, and joins Bessemer from VixCap, an investment management firm he founded and led. Prior to VixCap, Kaimal was senior director at India Resurgence Fund (IndiaRF), a leading India-focused investment platform, and began his career at McKinsey & Company.
Bessemer first invested in India 15 years ago and has had a dedicated team of investors on the ground ever since. The firm’s track record in India includes multi-stage investments — ranging from seed to Series D — in market-leading companies that are reshaping industries, such as: PharmEasy (pharmacy benefits), BigBasket (online grocery), Swiggy (food delivery), Urban Company (home services) and Perfios (credit underwriting platform). The partnership has realized seven IPOs within India including Home First Finance, IEX and Matrimony.com, and today has five companies within its portfolio valued at more than $1 billion, including Livspace (home interior platform) and MyGlamm (direct-to-consumer beauty).
With more than 135 IPOs and 200 portfolio companies in the enterprise, consumer and healthcare spaces, Bessemer supports founders and CEOs from their early days through every stage of growth. The firm’s global portfolio includes Pinterest, Shopify, Twilio, Yelp, LinkedIn, PagerDuty, DocuSign, Wix, Fiverr and Toast and has $9 billion of capital under management. Bessemer has teams of investors and partners located in Raising dedicated capital focused on investing in early stage opportunities in India supports the firm’s belief that innovation is borderless and continues its mission of positioning team members across the globe, including in Bangalore, Beijing, Boston, London, New York, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and Tel Aviv.
FinSMEs
01/12/2021