Nexus Venture Partners inches towards final close of fifth fund

By Joseph Rai

  • 24 May 2019
Credit: VCCircle

Homegrown venture capital firm Nexus Venture Partners, which is known for bets on Snapdeal, Delhivery and ShopClues, has received commitment from a few more Limited Partners (LPs) for its fifth fund that has a target corpus of $450 million.

Nexus has so far raised $353.5 million (Rs 2,460.5 crore) from a total of 32 investors, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The venture capital had raised $313 million from 29 investors for the new fund by June last year.

Nexus was founded by Naren Gupta, Suvir Sujan and Sandeep Singhal in 2006. It had raised $100 million in its maiden fund in the same year, $220 million in its second fund in 2008, and $270 million in its third fund in 2012.

In 2015, the early-stage investor became the first homegrown venture capital firm to cross $1 billion in assets under management after raising $450 million for its fourth and largest fund.

Nexus has invested in over 75 startups focusing on consumer retail, business services, healthcare, education as well as enterprise technology, according to its website.

A large part of Nexus’ portfolio comprises startups based in the US having some Indian presence. The US team is led by co-founder Gupta.

Nexus’ US bets include HyperTrack Inc., a startup that helps businesses track their executives and products in real time; Minio Inc., an open source-based cloud object storage startup; Druva Inc., an enterprise backup solutions provider; and Infoworks.io Inc, a data-warehousing company.

Notably, the US bets have worked as a hedge for Nexus against lack of exits from its India portfolio, according to a VCCircle analysis.

The venture capital firm invests $500,000 to $10 million in companies at an early stage of growth. It also makes follow-on bets in select companies.

VC fundraising

A number of domestic or India-focussed funds have hit fundraising milestones this year.

Earlier this week, venture capital firm Endiya Partners marked the first close of its second fund at $40 million.

Vertex Venture Holdings Ltd, an early-stage venture capital firm backed by Singapore's Temasek Holdings and Japanese venture capital firm GREE Ventures also announced fundraising milestones this month.

Last month, impact investor Omnivore Capital Management Advisors Pvt. Ltd marked the final close of its second fund at $97 million (Rs 679 crore), overshooting the initial target of $75 million.

Deep-technology and B2B-focused VC firm StartupXseed Ventures LLP and early-stage consumer-focussed venture capital firm DSG Consumer Partners also announced fundraising milestones last month.

In February, early-stage venture capital firm 3one4 Capital announced the first close of its dedicated opportunities fund to invest in select portfolio companies that are raising funding from the Series B stage onward.

In the same month, Entrepreneur First, which helps individuals build companies from scratch, marked the first close of its new deep technology-focussed global fund at $115 million.