Lightspeed Venture Partners has laid out aggressive plans to grow its startup sector investments in the South East Asia Region, with a focus on Indian Startup Market. To implement this strategy, the Venture Firm has closed a $500 million fund for India and Southeast Asia. The target is to double its investments in the startups in the regions.
Further, Lightspeed stated that Bejul Somaia, a partner at the firm, is elevated to its global leadership team in addition to his existing role advising investments in India.
This new fund comes from $7 billion capital that Lightspeed has raised to invest in early- and growth-stage startups across the globe.
“The closing of Lightspeed India IV at its $500M hard-cap reflects the firm’s deepening commitment to the India and South East Asia region, since our first India investment in 2007,” the firm said in a statement.
Lightspeed made its first investment in India in 2007, with unicorns like Oyo, Udaan, BYJU’S, Razorpay, and ShareChat under its portfolio. It will now invest further into early-stage startups with the new fund. It had raised $275 million in its third fund in 2020.
Alongside India IV, which is a dedicated early-stage fund vehicle, Lightspeed invests in growth-stage companies in the India and South East Asia regions from its Select and Opportunity fund vehicles.
Lightspeed Ventures New Fund beats investment market sentiments
The fundraise comes at a time when there is talk of a funding slowdown, however, this is in line with other leading global VCs which have made similar announcements. Sequoia has announced a $2.85 billion fundraise for India and South East investments. Accel formed a $650 million fund for the same region while Elevation Capital raised a $670 million India fund.
Lightspeed’s global and multi-stage strategy supports exceptional entrepreneurs across sectors, in any geography, and at any point in their entrepreneurial journey across twelve global offices and in six countries.
Since Lightspeed’s founding, the firm has partnered with more than 500 Enterprise, Consumer, Health and Fintech founders and their companies. Roughly a fourth of those companies have either been acquired or gone public, with 33 IPOs over the years.
Today’s funding, approximately 60% more than Lightspeed’s last flagship fundraise, focuses on expanding the firm’s early stage vehicles and supporting its large and growing global platform.
Lightspeed Ventures New Fund to bolster Indian Startup Sector
This announcement by Lightspeed may come as a booster for the Indian startup ecosystem as it gives a strong indication that capital is available for early-stage companies.
“We continue to witness the broadening and deepening of the opportunity in the region, led by world-class founders and an ever-expanding scope for technology to reshape the economy in India and Southeast Asia,” Lightspeed noted.
According to the VC firm, over the past five years, it has expanded to 28 professionals across four locations—Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, and Singapore.
“In the early 2000s, Lightspeed started building a global footprint given our conviction that the future of technology and entrepreneurship would be global. Today, Lightspeed has 70 investors located across twelve cities globally,” said Bejul Somaia, Partner, Lightspeed.
Over 30% of Lightspeed’s consumer investments are in female-founded companies and 2021 was its most geographically diverse in its history.
With over $1.2 billion in distributions, Lightspeed’s Healthcare practice has been focused on improving patient lives over the last ten years, initially recognizing the value of health data with the dawn of the genomic era by investing in diagnostic and cutting-edge platform technologies, quickly followed by an expansion into biotherapeutics.
Today, almost every business is now a fintech business, which is why Lightspeed has invested over $1.5B in close to 100 global Fintech companies including $600M specifically in blockchain and emerging use cases
