Nexus Venture Partners and Mayfield Fund backed agri-logistics company Sohan Lal Commodity Management is looking to raise upto Rs 100 crore (~$20 million) in its third round of fundraising, two people with direct knowledge of the deal said.
The company is in advance talks with Everstone Capital to raise the amount through a structured deal.
The company is valued at Rs 350-450 crore,†one of the persons mentioned above said. This means, the PE firm may pick around 25 per cent in the latest round.
The second person privy to the developments said the company is looking at expanding its warehousing capacity with the proceeds of fund raising.
An mail sent to Sandeep Sabharwal, founder and CEO, Sohan Lal Commodity Management did not elicit any response.
Sandeep Singhal, co founder and partner with Nexus Venture Partners offered declined to comment for the story. The spokesperson of Everstone did not respond to an e-mail query sent by VCCircle.
In March 2011, Mayfield India and Nexus Venture Partners invested Rs 35.5 crore in Sohan Lal Commodity. The company had earlier also raised Rs 10 crore from Nexus Venture Partners.
Sohan Lal Commodity Management is focused on providing post-harvest agricultural solutions. It provides agri-commodity warehouse management and procurement solutions to farmers, processors, traders, agri exchanges and government across 70 locations and 12 states in India. The company works across all types of agri-commodities ranging from cereals, pulses, oil seeds and spices with a warehousing space of more than 150,000 metric tonne of over one million sq feet.
The company works with some of the leading names in the agri-commodity space such as Cargill, AWB, Adani, Jindal, Ruchi Soya, Louis Dreyfus, Glencore as a service provider.
According to VCCEdge, a data research platform of VCCircle, Sohan Lal clocked a turnover of Rs 12.83 crore with net profit of Rs 1.6 crore and EBITDA of Rs 2.6 crore as on March 2011. This means the firm is being valued 150x its one year old EBITDA. The firm’s revenues and EBITDA grew almost threefold in FY’11. Assuming a similar growth pattern for the year ended March 2012, the latest deal could valued it around 50x trailing EBITDA, as per VCCircle estimates.
