Moglix, Livspace Backer Jungle Ventures Hits Final Close Of Fourth Vc Fund At $600 Mn

“India has been growing rapidly in terms of our dollar allocation. So roughly 50% or even more of the new fund could go into India,” Amit Anand, founding partner, Jungle Ventures, told VCCircle in an interaction.

In a separate statement, Jungle Ventures said that the $600 million corpus comprises $450 million in the main fund and $150 million in additional managed commitments.

He noted that Indian entrepreneurs have become more ambitious who no longer want to be the leader in the domestic market but want to be the leader in Southeast Asia, Middle East and in some case globally.

“We were perhaps the first investors who told entrepreneurs that we will help you go global. In 2012 we invested in ZipDial and helped them go global and it was sold to Twitter. Today if you look at some of our recent companies like Turtlemint, Leap, Moglix, Livspace, Vayana Network — we’ve helped all of these companies expand outside India,” he explained.

Over 50% of the total commitments in the new fund have come from existing investors including Temasek, International Finance Corp (IFC), Dutch investor FMO, and German development finance institution DEG. “If I look at all our key existing LPs, each one of them have done between 100-200% reup in our new fund,” noted Anand.

Jungle Ventures also took this opportunity to rope in new investors such as Japan’s Mizuho Bank Ltd and global asset manager StepStone Group, said Anand, adding that most of the fundraising happened virtually.

He also said that 50% of its LPs are family offices and the remaing half institutions. In terms of geographical split between the LPs, it is almost one third each between Asia, Europe and the US.

“We curate our LP base to ensure that there is lot of diversity and see them as our extended family that support our portolio companeis via co-investments, market intelligence, and market access,” he said.

In terms of co-investments with its LPs, for every dollar Jungle Ventures has invested in its portfolio company around $1.2-$1.3 has been invested by its LPs.

The latest fundraise has brought Jungle Ventures total assets under management (AUM) to over $1 billion. The Singapore-based investor, founded by Anand and Anurag Srivastava, mobilised $10 million for its first fund in 2012. The VC firm then went on to raise $100 million for its second fund in 2016 and $240 million for its third fund in 2019.

Anand underlined that while the fourth fund is larger, Jungle Ventures will continue to maintain a concentrated portfolio of 15-18 companies across India and Southeast Asia. This means that Jungle Ventures will reserve more capital for follow-on bets on its portfolio companies.

So far, for every $1 million Jungle Ventures has invested in its company, it has typically done a follow-on of $2-10 million. “If you look at Livspace and Moglix we have been investors in them since seed to the time they turned unicorn and we are still invested in them. With more firepower now we can do more follow-on investments from the new fund,” he said. A unicorn is a privately-held startup with a valuation of at least $1 billion.

The fourth fund had made the first close at $225 million in September last year. Anand said that it has committed about 10% of the corpus so far. The investments from the new fund in India include Eveworld, a Web3 based social-crypto-community platform for women), inFeedo, an employee experience software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform and Atomberg, a direct-to-consumer (D2C) consumer electronics brand.

Anand explained that one of the larger new macro themes that Jungle Ventures is now starting is to put more capital behind decentralisation.

“We are living in a very interesting time where decentralisation is making a more equitable internet and hence, we like that approach. We think that the power of the internet in the hands of the smallest participant in the internet economy is the right way to go forward as the next wave of innovation happens,” he noted.

So concepts like social commerce where businesses are empowering smaller entrepreneurs and helping them compete with the Amazons of the world, or concepts like Web3 where businesses are enabling local entrepreneurs with the latest technology to have a say in how the business is run look interesting for the VC firm.

Web3 or Web 3.0 stands for a decentralised version of the Internet that runs on peer-to-peer technologies such as a public blockchain.

Other venture capital firms like Sequoia Capital and Accel have also increased their focus on Web3 investments in India. Recently, VCCircle also wrote about the interest of venture capital firms like Rocketship.vc, Lightspeed and General Catalyst in cryptocurrency and Web3.

Jungle Ventures is also assessing edtech startups leveraging Web3 and has already made a bet on a startup which is in a stealth mode. “We have invested in an edtech company which is bringing the power of AI (artificial intelligence) and decentralisation to the next wave of teachers and mentors,” he said without disclosing its identity.

He also said that the fund will selectively look to invest in startups in the food and climate spaces where it is seeing “interesting business models come up”.

In terms of exits, he said that Jungle Ventures has made a gross 40% internal rate of return (IRR) across all the funds via mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and secondary sales. He added that he expects exits via initial public offering (IPO) to happen in the coming years as its portfolio companies have reached scale.

Last year, several early-stage VC firms announced fundraising milestones. Chiratae Ventures, Stellaris Venture Partners and WaterBridge Ventures announced the final close of their new funds and Blume Ventures announced the first close. 

The fundraising momentum is continuing in 2022 as well. In March, Accel India, an early backer of startups such as Flipkart and Freshworks, raised $650 million in commitments for its seventh fund to invest in new opportunities like emerging tech across India and Southeast Asia. In February, early-stage venture capital firm Prime Venture Partners marked the final close of its fourth fund at $120 million.

Last month, Arkam Ventures, a venture capital firm floated by former executives at Helion Venture Partners and Kalaari Capital, marked the final close of its first fund at $106 million. Fintech focused fund Beams Fintech Fund also completed the first close of its maiden growth-stage fund last month.