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PE Firm New Silk Route Raises $1.34 Billion

By Madhav A Chanchani

  • 08 Nov 2008

India focused private equity fund New Silk Route (NSR) has raised $1.34 billion for its $1.5 billion fund. New Silk Route PE Asia Fund LP has said that it has raised the amount in a regulatory filing, reports Pehub. NSR started investing in India early last year and has done several deals since then, including buyouts.

NSR's fouding members include Parag Saxena, who was one of the early investors in Starbucks and also has a venture capital firm Vedanta. Some others are ex-McKinsey honcho Rajat Gupta, Jacob Kurien and its founding team also included Amit Chandra, former DSP Merill Lynch MD. Chandra left NSR earlier this year to head India office of Bain Capital, one of the top five PE funds in the world.

Fund raising in the current market has become quite a difficult task, with amount raised in the last quarter the lowest since 2005. There are about 84 funds from India which are out in the market to raise capital aggregating to $27.2 billion, according to Prequin. NSR, with experienced investor like Saxena and Gupta on the helm, might find going a little easy. NSR has got $50 million from CDC, the UK government-backed fund of funds, earlier this year.

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NSR has been quite active in India since it has started operations. It has invested mainly in unlisted in firms in sectors as manufacturing, infrastructure, telecom and IT, consumer business, and financial services. It has invested in two telecom tower companies, Reliance Telecom Infrastructure and Aster Infrastructure. While in former it was part of a consortium that bought a 5% stake, the latter was a buyout where it acquired a 72% stake for $56.5 million.

NSR's most recent deal was buyout of Mumbai-based Dawnay Day AV Financial Services. Some of its other investments are INX, Rolex Rings and south-based Aster Telecom.

 

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