SAIF Partners launches $400 mn India fund

Venture and growth capital firm SAIF Partners has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to raise $400 million for its new India fund. 

Called SAIF Partners India VII, this will be the firm’s fourth India dedicated fund. SAIF did not provide any details on how it plans to deploy the capital. However, the corpus is larger than its previous India fund of $350 million launched in 2017. 

In India, the company has backed unicorns such as fintech player Paytm, online food delivery startup Swiggy, baby products etailer FirstCry and edtech platform Unacademy among others. 

Around 10% of its previous India-focused fund was used to back public companies including TCNS Clothing, Safari Industries and JM Financial, while it made three seed round investments from the SAIF Partners India VI, according to data sourced from VCCEdge. 

The fund’s portfolio includes companies in the consumer technology, education, financial services, healthcare, information technology (IT) services, logistics, mobile, software as a service ( SaaS) and manufacturing sectors. Recently, SAIF Partners backed industrial goods marketplace Industrybuying sold a majority stake in its SME business to Japanese firm MontaRO. 

In August, the fund promoted Mayank Khanduja to managing director, who joined Deepak Gaur, Mukul Arora, Mridul Arora and Alok Goel. The India fund is led by managing partner Ravi Adusumalli.

SAIF Partners is the latest venture capital firm to raise a new India fund. Earlier this year Lightspeed announced the close of its third India fund at $275 million. Sequoia Capital is reportedly in talks to raise a $1.25 billion fund for India, its largest to date. In December 2019, early stage venture capital fund Accel announced its $550 million India fund.