Lightbox raises $100M in new tech-focused VC fund

Lightbox Management Ltd, a new VC firm floated by former Sherpalo Ventures' India head Sandeep Murthy, has closed its second fund at $100 million (about Rs 610 crore) from overseas institutional investors, family offices, as per separate media reports citing a company executive.

It had announced its first close at $25 million in April this year.

The fund was originally targeting a corpus of $90 million (approximately Rs 540 crore) and VCCircle had first reported that the fund has been oversubscribed.

Back then, Murthy said, "The second fund will continue to focus on early-stage investments in the consumer tech space. It will have a concentrated investment portfolio of eight companies, in which it will invest $3-5 million in Series A funding with an investment horizon of seven-eight years."

Lightbox was started with two funds, one of which has stakes in some half a dozen firms as a result of a spinout or synthetic secondary transaction involving existing investments of Sherpalo and KPCB in India. The first fund has a portfolio comprising GreenDust, ZoomIn, MapmyIndia, Paymate, FutureBazaar and Kotak Urja.

Besides these, the fund has invested in Embibe.com, an online test prep portal specialising in engineering entrance exams

Murthy, director of Lightbox India Advisors Pvt Ltd, part of Lightbox Management, spent almost nine years advising Sherpalo on India investments, which included InMobi, Cleartrip, Naukri and Greendust. He led Series A investments and taken operational roles such as CEO and head of corporate development at InMobi, Cleartrip and GreenDust in the past.

Other partners of Lightbox include Siddharth Talwar, an angel investor who founded and later sold Evolv to NIIT; and Prashant Mehta, former CEO of Komli Media. The fund's US partners include Sunny Rao, currently CEO of ZoomIn who earlier co-founded Half.com, which was acquired by eBay for $350 million; and Jeremy Wenokur, an angel investor who spent the past 17 years in the consumer technology space in the US and was Google's first corporate development person.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)