Rocketship targets Asia with second global VC fund
Rocketship, a US-based data science-focused venture capital firm that has backed a number of Indian start-ups, has closed its second global fund at $100 million with a strong focus on Asia.
LPs in the fund include Adams Street Partners and Vulcan Capital, a philanthropic but returns-focused firm created by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen that is currently expanding into Asia.
Fund II is expected to maintain the firm’s significant focus on Asia. Its predecessor, which raised a $40 million fund in 2015, invested 44 companies, 10 of which were headquartered in India and one in Hong Kong. Focus areas include education, agricultural, and financial technologies, software-as-a-service, and enterprise-facing models, with a geographic preference for India and Southeast Asia.
Rocketship was founded in 2013 by US entrepreneurs Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan who previously had stints at Amazon and Walmart. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic curbing international travel, the VC firm believes it can use digital tools to continue investing in the region. It claims to have proprietary algorithms that can identify outperforming start-ups at an early stage.
“The pandemic has also brought sharp focus on two areas where India has traditionally lagged: healthcare and education. We see tremendous opportunities here from online vernacular [non-English language] education to telemedicine, online pharmacies to support and mental health,” said Ramakrishnan, a parter at Rocketship, according to Livemint.
Some of the Indian start-ups that have received investment from Rocketship include real estate marketplace NoBroker, industrial goods marketplace Moglix, e-bike sharing start-up Yulu Motors, and bookkeeping start-up Khatabook, which is backed by B Capital and plans to offer its services to small businesses in Southeast Asia. The India portfolio has seen two exits, with Netherlands-based fintech provider PayU acquiring Paysense in January and offline-to-online retail enabler Fynd being acquired by Reliance Industries last year.
Rocketship is also an investor in the start-up ecosystems of Brazil, Germany, Canada, and Sweden. Recently, Tribe Capital, a San Francisco-based VC comprising many of the early investors in workforce collaboration platform Slack, has also begun investing with a similar India thesis. It backed logistics services provider Shiprocket in May.
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