Avendus Aims to Raise $350 Million in Funding

Indian top investment bank for venture deals, Avendus aims to raise up to $350 million in funding to boost its new private equity fund.

Wednesday, Avendus, the leading investment bank in India specializing in venture transactions, announced that it intends to raise a maximum of $350 million for its forthcoming private equity fund.

In an interview with TechCrunch, the firm’s managing partner, Ritesh Chandra, explained that the Future Leaders Fund III will allow the Mumbai-based firm to write more giant cheques and maintain a significant stake in the startups it backs. Early in April, TechCrunch reported that Avendus was developing a strategy to raise a new fund.

Avendus, which has become an integral part of most growth-stage transactions in India, has positioned itself as the nation’s leading venture advisor for entrepreneurs. The firm rendered its services over thirty transactions in the previous year, encompassing mergers and acquisitions, as reported by Venture Intelligence, an exclusive market intelligence platform. The increasing magnitude of its private equity division highlights the company’s aspirations to penetrate the ecosystem further and derive more significant benefits from its successes.

Many of Avendus’ well-established global competitors, including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JP Morgan, initially paid less attention to the Indian market, facilitating the company’s ascent to prominence and enabling it to establish connections with the nation’s burgeoning tech entrepreneurs.

Additionally, these connections facilitate the firm’s private equity division’s access to several of the most prominent transactions. Besides SoftBank, the primary backer, financial services startups Juspay and Zeta have exclusively listed Avendus on their capitalization tables. Chandra stated, “These businesses emerged from our networks and relationships.”

In addition to Delhivery, Lenskart, Licious, VerSe Innovation, Xpressbees, and the National Stock Exchange in its portfolio, the private equity division of Avendus has developed a reputation for promptly delivering substantial exits to its backers. For example, LensKart and the National Stock Exchange returned to Avendus four times the amount he had invested within four years of investing.

Our fund has a five to six-year lifecycle. An issue regarding the Indian startup ecosystem pertains to investors’ substantial infusion of capital, who fail to observe returns for an extended duration. “Our primary objective is to recover our invested capital,” Chandra stated.

Although the number of tech firms in India going public is increasing (a feat unheard of only four years ago), investors cannot depend exclusively on IPOs to generate returns. Chandra asserts that Avendus has forged alliances that facilitate the firm’s exit strategies by selling stakes to sovereign investors and other late-stage investors. This offers an alternative means of generating returns beyond the confines of initial public offerings.