The Venture Intelligence Blog

An article by Institutional Investor  covers an EY's 2019 Global Alternative Fund Survey on institutional investors moving allocation from Hedge Funds to Private Equity. Snapshots from the article are below: In 2019, hedge funds made up 33 percent of institutional investors’ allocations to alternatives. That’s a 7 percentage point drop from 2018, according to EY’s 2019 global alternative fund survey released Wednesday. Private equity was the big winner, growing to 25 percent of investors’ alternatives bet from 18 percent the year before, EY reported. Alternatives as a whole made up a quarter of investors’ portfolios, up slightly from 24 percent last year. We’ve seen that hedge fund offerings have been challenged on a number of fronts. Your long-only and long-short equity managers are continuing to face pressure from ETFs and institutional investors that can do that on their own, Ryan Munson, a partner in EY’s asset and wealth management practice and an author of the repo...

Source: Flipkart.com That Flipkart was able to attract such a large investment  and that too at a valuation that's double of what one of its existing investors had marked it down to  just a few months ago, has come as a big relief to Early Stage investors.  ET-NOW Startup Central has a discussion  featuring Rehan Yar Khan of Orios Venture Partners , K.Ganesh of GrowthStory and Arun Natarajan of Venture Intelligence  on the impact.  As part of the show, Arun indicates the fact that investors in the latest round were strategic ones with deep pockets, bodes well for Flipkart. The repeated mark downs made some of Flipkart's previous investors - especially the mutual fund arms of Fidelity, Morgan Stanley and others - have been a source of distraction for Flipkart even as it battles Amazon.com in the marketplace.  (Such investors have to put a value on their investments - even in privately held companies - each quarter).  According to...

Frankie Brown of Investec has an interesting take on Indian E-Commerce in Economic Times . Extracts: The funding slowdown has revealed as much about the Indian venture capital market as the companies they evaluate. It is a small world of IIT buddies and their gossiping, of egos and posturing, bluff and counter-bluff. Where the fearful see chaos, the wise see opportunity — the market is full of increasingly attractive deals. ...What concerns me is the over-reliance of the market on such a small number of investors. With traditional private equity reluctant to get involved, and offline players choosing to remain wilfully blind, Tiger, Naspers, Soft-Bank and Alibaba have run riot, waving magic wands and making princes and paupers of those they select and jettison. There remains a concern that in the world of “bigger is better,” inefficiencies are creeping into the market. ...Valuations are a matter of conjecture, but what is happening on the ground is indisputable. The seismic shif...