Sequoia Capital, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm, has raised an additional funding of $125 million for its fourth India-focused fund. With this new funding, the overall corpus of the fund is now over $850 million.
In its filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Sequoia Capital has said that its fund — Sequoia Capital India IV has raised additional capital last week. The latest capital will take the total capital under management at Sequoia Capital India, which also invests in Southeast Asia, to about $3.2 billion.
Prior to this new capital infusion, the said fund already had raised about $530 million in May 2014. That was followed by another fundraising activity which saw the infusion of $200 million in the fund.
Interestingly, the venture capital firm, which invested in the likes of Zomato and Mu Sigma, has also raised its fifth fund of $930 million in early 2016. Currently, the firm is making use of this fund to make new investments in the country.
Sequoia Capital India IV primarily invested its money in the year 2014 and 2015. That was the time when the valuation of Indian consumer internet companies were at peak. A slew of strategic investors and hedge funds, including SoftBank, had started to back startups aggressively.
Among the many venture capital firms aggressively investing in Indian startups was Sequoia Capital. At that time, the firm invested in a slew of hyperlocal ventures like TinyOwl, Roadrunnr and Tapzo. The sector was the hot-favorite for investors and Sequoia didn’t want to miss out, as it did with the online retail sector.
However, the hyperlocal market didn’t deliver results as per the expectation, and slowly many startups in the space started to shut down. For Sequoia Capital, TinyOwl and Roadrunnr merged, but the combined entity — Runnr, is now up for sale.
But the firm has been able to make early investments in some of the most valuable companies in Southeast Asia. It has placed its bet on Indonesian bike taxi player GoJek, which was valued at over $2 billion recently, and Tokopedia – Indonesia’s largest e-commerce company.
Apart from Sequoia Capital, IDG Ventures India and Sama Capital have also closed new funds in the current year, while firms like SAIF Partners are in the process of raising fresh capital.
