6 startups raised a funding of $1.55 billion (Rs 11,580 crore) and entered the unicorn club within 4 days, April 4-April 6. It has been a bench-marking week in the domestic domain of start-ups.
Just a dozen privately held startups valued at $1 billion or more make space for the Unicorn club in 2020. It marked the highest ever record for a year in India. 2021 has already touched a figure of 10 unicorn startups in India.
Last week, the six deals that were announced belonged to the healthcare sector (Pharmeasy), social commerce sector (Meesho), fintech sector (Groww and Cred), and social and content platforms (Gupshup and ShareChat parent Mohalla Tech).
New York-based Tiger Global has invested in four of the six newly entrant unicorns. It infused $502 million of investment in ShareChat and the $83 million round in Groww. Gupshup raised $100 million of funds from the only investor- The Fund, after 10 years.
“Tiger is the new SoftBank,” as per the statement published in Economics Times of Anand Lunia, founding partner at India Quotient which is an early-stage investor with a portfolio including Lendingkart, Sugar Cosmetics and ShareChat.
Meesho Founder Vidit Aatrey said that SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 infused an investment of $300 million in the social platform- Meesho, which faced rejection in its initial years of fundraising because of the e-commerce model that focussed on small businesses in India.
Meesho Founder added, “To the team, it’s a sign of validation and a sign of a larger responsibility being put on our shoulders, and a belief that we can pull off our ambitious vision of bringing 100 million small businesses online. It is all exciting and inspiring for everyone and we are enjoying that.”
Ankush Sachdeva, chief executive officer of ShareChat and Moj shared in a blog post, “We are at a significant inflection point in our company’s journey — as the Internet penetration deepens in India, we are well-positioned to expand our ecosystem of products to over 1 billion monthly active users cumulatively.”
The week’s deal activity and unicorn bonanza as a result of hard work and process over several months, expressed Vinod Murali, the Managing partner at Alteria Capital Advisors.
He further says, “We should continue to see similar momentum for the next few quarters, but hope founders are able to use the abundant supply of capital well and build fundamentally strong businesses.”
In total, across 21 deals, Indian startups raised $2.6 billion on April 3-9, as per the data provided by industry tracker Venture Intelligence.
Falcon Edge, another New York-based fund emerged as a key investor in funding the startups. It put $800 million of capital along with Amansa Capital, in food delivery startup Swiggy at a valuation of $5 billion. It helped the startup to compete with the IPO-bound rival Zomato. Falcon Edge also led a $215 million round offending in fintech startup- Cred at a valuation of $2.2 billion.
Other major deals included a $65 million round led by General Catalyst (early backers of Airbnb, and Stripe) in the Car-reselling platform Spinny and Of Business’ D2 round of series of $110 million, led by Falcon Edge at a valuation of $800 million.
As per a joint report by Nasscom and technology consultancy Zinnov, India can expect to get more than 50 startup unicorns in 2021.