The Venture Intelligence Blog

Portfolio has several overlaps with other big investors; makes repeat investments in select sectors such as Edtech and Fintech Known for its aggressive take on the Indian startup space, this this US-headquartered investors - with roots in the hedge fund world - has been hitting the headlines repeatedly this year with its participation in consecutive Mega funding rounds ($100M+ deals). The investee companies are typically big names in the country's startup ecosystem. Flashback Five years ago, when Venture Intelligence had analysed Tiger Global’s rising impact on Startup India (including an infographic depicting the overlap of Tiger's portfolio with other active investors during that period), the firm’s VC-type investments had been led by Lee Fixel. After closing 37 deals in 2015, Tiger Global went into a 'Slowdown Phase' between 2016 and 2018, when it invested around $250 million across just 22 deals and began to focus on cashing out from its earlier bets.  The mega exi...

Press Release Private Equity - Venture Capital firms invested over $11.9 Billion (across 188 deals) in the first 3 months of 2021, representing an increase of about 85% compared to the same period in 2020, shows data from  Venture Intelligence , a research service focused on private company financials, transactions and their valuations. (Jan-March 2020, the last pre-pandemic quarter, had recorded PE-VC investments of $6.5 Billion across 238 deals.) The value of investments in Q1'21 was also over 58% higher compared to the immediate previous quarter (which saw $7.5 Billion being invested across 231 deals). Deal volumes in the period however dipped 21% compared to Q1'20 and down 19% compared to the previous quarter, the Venture Intelligence data showed. (Note: These figures include Venture Capital investments, but exclude PE investments in Real Estate).  The appetite for investing in high scale technology startups gathered further momentum in Q1’21, led by the over $400 mil...

Economic Times has an analysis on why and how Hike has seemingly lost the plot in India's high-stakes messaging battle ground. The article builds on the late May 2018 post by Hike founder  Kavin Bharti Mittal  that foretold the  layoff of 25% of the Unicorn company's staff . Extracts: In the last 18 months, Hike’s monthly active users (MAUs) have halved (37 million to 18 million) and its daily active users (DAU) diminished by two-thirds (23 million to 8 million), according to app intelligence service App Annie.  ...The common hypothesis within Hike was that a majority of its users were from tier IIIII (sic) towns and cities and those who could be classified as SEC B and C. But it failed to get the right market niche.    ...“For loyal users of Hike, people who love the product, there is use case for one person, say using it in hidden mode. And there exist multiple replicas of that one person. Ideally, Hike should have built around that audience, ...

A Mint article showcases Venture Intelligence data on Venture Capital firms with most Unicorn companies in their portfolio. #1 Tiger Global (5), #2 Sequoia Capital India (3) Venture Intelligence is India's longest serving provider of data and analysis on Private Company Financials, Transactions (private equity, venture capital and M&A) & their Valuations in India.

Mint has listed (on its front page) various fancy "GMV" goals totted out by CEOs of Indian E-Commerce Unicorns - at various points to various media outlets - but have been "missed by big margins". Extract: Payments start-up Paytm launched its e-commerce business only in 2014, years after Flipkart and Snapdeal. But that didn’t stop the company from spelling out growth targets that would put its rivals to shame. Alibaba-backed Paytm said in an April 2015   interview with   Mint   that it will generate annualized GMV of more than $4 billion by December 2015. In an interview this February with the   Hindu BusinessLine  newspaper, Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma said the company was clocking GMV of $3 billion, which means it missed its sales target. No sweat. Paytm has set an even more ambitious target of hitting $10 billion in GMV by this December.   ..."If these goals are anything to go by, it would seem as if accountability isn’t high on the list of pr...

Siddhartha Jain has a nice analysis on why we haven't seen an Indian Education Unicon emerge yet. And why we still might. Venture Intelligence is the leading provider of data and analysis on Private Company Financials, Transactions (private equity, venture capital and M&A) & their Valuations in India. Click Here to Sign Up for the FREE Weekly Edition of the Deal Digest: India's First & Most Exhaustive Transactions Newsletter.

Q: What do you call a $100 million plus investment by Hedge Funds, Mutual Funds and other typically  public market investors, in Startup companies?  A: "A Private IPO"  (to put a small spin on term coined by Josh Kopelman, CEO of US-based First Round Capital) Q: Isn't IPO short for Initial Public Offering? A: Well, fuddy duddy, welcome to Tech (Bubble / Not Bubble / Bubble / Not Bubble) Land. As of now, anything - including seeming Oxymora - goes. In these unusual times, Indian startups dominate list of cases cited by investors in Asia and other parts of the world. Here's an extract (emphasis mine) from a post titled " Alert: Venture Capital Tsunami in South Asia " by Piyush Chaplot , Partner at Singapore-based Innosight Ventures : Strategic investors such as Softbank, Rakuten, Alibaba, Naspers, etc. are throwing money as if there is no tomorrow. Sovereign Wealth Funds such as GIC, Temasek, QIA and Khazanah want their share of the pie. Even Pri...