Deal Roundup: Pine Labs, Moglix lead a robust funding week; Mindtree snaps up L&T NxT

Despite the devastating second wave of Covid-19 infection in the country, startup dealmaking continues at pace buoyed by upbeat investor sentiment in growth stage technology companies. 

Three late stage technology startups -- Pine Labs, Moglix, and Lenskart -- together pulled in nearly $500 million this week. Overall, 22 technology startups raised capital this week, of which 16 accounted for a total investment of $564.5 million. Six startups did not disclose the funding amount.  

Notably, the week admitted yet another homegrown startup to the club of unicorns – startups valued privately at $1 billion or more. Industrial goods marketplace Moglix raised $120 million led by alternative investments firm Falcon Edge Capital and Harvard Management Company (HMC). The latest infusion gave the B2B ecommerce company a valuation of $1 billion. Tiger Global Management, Sequoia Capital India and Venture Highway were returning investors in the round. 

Payment solutions and merchant commerce platform provider Pine Labs drew the largest cheque at $285 million which it plans to use to grow its merchant commerce platform and online payments stack. The round is a combination of primary capital infusion and secondary stake sales by existing shareholders including the company’s founder and employees.  The transaction valued the Delhi NCR based company at $3 billion. 

Among other notable funding deals, global private equity firm KKR announced an investment of $95 million in omni-channel eyewear brand Lenskart on Monday through a secondary stake acquisition. The investment will create partial exits for early investors TPG Growth and TR Capital, which bet on Lenskart in 2014. 

Also, spacetech startups Skyroot and Agnikul, consulting firm ANSR, and EV charging solutions startup Magenta raised double-digit rounds this week. 

The week was also busy on the mergers and acquisitions front with about half a dozen deals announced. 

Mumbai based engineering and construction conglomerate Larsen & Toubro (L&T) transferred its digital transformation business, L&T-NxT, to its technology consulting and services subsidiary Mindtree. The transaction involves a cash consideration of Rs 198 crore including earnouts, subject to adjustments as per terms of the business transfer agreement, said regulatory filings by Mindtree on Thursday. The transaction will be completed by July 31, 2021. 

Edtech platform Emeritus acquired Silicon Valley based STEM education solution provider iD Tech for $200 million all cash transaction. iD Tech works with close to 150 universities globally, across 135 countries. It focuses on STEM skills such as AI, coding and offers summer camps on the same. The acquisition will enable Emeritus to tap into the growing K-12 edtech market.  

Founded by Ashwin Damera in 2015, Emeritus offers executive education programmes globally. India is its biggest market. 

Pune based information technology (IT) services company Persistent Systems acquired the assets of San Jose, California and Pune based Sureline Systems, a cloud migration and disaster recovery solutions provider.   

Mumbai-headquartered engineering and construction major Larsen & Toubro (L&T) announced it will acquire a 6.35% stake in Delaware based remote virtual assistance application firm Help Lightning for a cash consideration of $2.5 million.  

The Rohatyn Group’s (TRG) digital transformation firm Ness Digital Engineering acquired Risk Focus, a New York-headquartered consulting and advisory firm specializing in digital transformation for financial services. In addition, Pune headquartered IT services firm Zensar Technologies announced it was buying data engineering and analytics firm M3bi.