VC Firm Nexus Venture Partners To Raise Fifth Fund Of Upto $400 Mn

Homegrown VC firm, Nexus Venture Partners, is expected to raise its fifth fund targeting a corpus of $350Mn-$400 Mn. An ET reported cited three people close to the development, who said that the VC firm will increase the share of investments in US based software companies.

Nexus Venture Partners was founded in 2006 by three former entrepreneurs-Silicon Valley-based Naren Gupta along with Mumbai-based Sandeep Singhal and Suvir Sujan. Nexus had raised $100 Mn in its first fund. Currently, Nexus has about $1.2 Bn in assets under management, with its fourth fund raising of $450 Mn concluded in 2015.

However, a lot has changed with regard to its portfolio since then. Some of its bets like Snapdeal, Shopclues, Housing ( now merged with PropTiger), Stayzilla (stuck in the midst of insolvency proceedings) and Tinyowl (acquired by Runnr which in turn was acquired by Zomato) have seen write-offs or significant value erosion. Last year, the VC firm was hard hit after the SoftBank orchestrated merger between Flipkart and Snapdeal did not transpire, as it had passed up several opportunities to take an exit from Snapdeal.

Hence the focus on investing more in the more defensible US software space as several of its bets on the consumer-internet space have not gone as well as expected.

However there are other software bets like cloud data management player Druva, customer care tool company Helpshift, tech-enabled logistics player Delhivery which are doing well.

In 2017, the VC firm invested in a $17.5 Mn (INR 113 Cr) emergency funding round of Snapdeal , in the Series A round of funding of location tracking service HyperTrack, in the $8.5 Mn Series A funding  round of food and grocery wholesale marketplace Jumbotail, and in Mumbai-based fintech startup PaySense. In all, Nexus Venture Partners has invested in about 75 startups focusing on consumer retail, business services, healthcare, education and enterprise technology from its four funds.

[The development was reported by ET]

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