Venture Highway raises $79m for second India seed fund
New Delhi-headquartered venture capital firm Venture Highway has raised $78.6 million for its second fund, which will focus on early-stage investments in technology start-ups.
Founded in 2015, Venture Highway constitutes a five-person team led by Samir Sood (pictured), a former Google and Cisco Systems investment executive. The firm has backed over 30 Indian start-ups so far.
The fund achieved a first close of $39 million last July, having set a target of $92 million, according to a US regulatory filing. The identities of the LPs have not been disclosed. For its first fund, Venture Highway secured Neeraj Arora, a former global business head at WhatsApp who was involved in several fund investments by Google in India, as a founding LP.
The firm led the earliest funding rounds for O4S, a provider of inventory tracking software for retail brands, Meesho, a reseller network targeting part-time home-based businesses, and MyPetrolPump, a fuel delivery start-up. Last August, Meesho raised $125 million with support from Facebook and Sequoia Capital India. Another investee, non-English social media platform ShareChat, received backing from Twitter last year.
Venture Highway achieved an exit last year when ShieldSquare, a cybersecurity firm that helps websites screen incoming bot-based traffic, was acquired by Israel's Radware.
The strategy for Fund II is to make investments of $1 million and above for technology start-ups targeting Indian consumers and businesses. There are likely to be 25-30 deals in total.
“We’ve been very under the radar to date. This is the first time we have brought in external LPs, all of whom can be described as iconic investors, primarily from Silicon Valley, and are a mishmash of tech founders, people who are in the venture capital business, and are long on India,” Sood told The Economic Times.
Sood was part of the team that coordinated Google’s $750 million acquisition of AdMob, a monetization engine for in-app advertisements, in 2009. He also featured in Cisco’s $450 million acquisition of Airespace, a networking hardware firm, in 2005.
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