Indian family offices invest $52m in FirstCry

The incoming investors are MEMG Family Office, which is controlled by Ranjan Pai, CEO of Manipal Education & Medical Group, the parent company of Manipal Hospitals; Sharrp Ventures, which represents the Harsh Mariwala family, owner of consumer goods giant Marico; and the family office of Hemendra Kothari, chairman of DSP Investment Managers.

SoftBank was the only seller named in a statement by Avendus Capital, which advised FirstCry on the transaction. AVCJ Research’s records show that SoftBank committed approximately USD 300m to the company across two tranches in 2019 and 2020. The Economic Times reported that the investor had offloaded 1.5%-2% of its 29% holding at a valuation of around USD 3bn.

Launched in 2010, FirstCry has evolved from an online platform into an omnichannel player with more than 900 stores across 350 cities. It claims 7.5m registered users. The company has also expanded into the Middle East. In addition to offering more than 200,000 products under 5,800 brands, FirstCry has built India’s largest online community for parents. The platform has 13m unique monthly users.

The company has received more than USD 700m in private funding to date and spawned two spinouts – logistics start-up Xpressbees and brand agglomeration platform GlobalBees. Both went on to raise capital independently, achieving unicorn status last year.

Elevation Capital became FirstCry’s first institutional investor in 2011, committing USD 4m. A year later, it re-upped three times in the subsequent four years, with Chiratae Ventures, Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India, New Enterprise Associates, and Valiant Capital Management also joining the cap table.

The SoftBank investments were followed, in 2021, by a USD 315m investment from TPG Growth, ChrysCapital Partners, and PremjiInvest. That transaction included primary and secondary shares.

"Our early investors have been instrumental in our success, and we are delighted to have helped deliver multi-fold returns to our investors. I welcome our new investors who bring with them exceptional track record and knowledge of scaling large successful businesses in India, which will be highly valuable in our journey ahead,” said Supam Maheshwari, co-founder and CEO of FirstCry.

Indian family offices are increasingly active investors in private markets, especially in the technology space. Catamaran, the investment vehicle of Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy, has about USD 1bn in assets under management, of which 25%-30% is in private equity and venture capital. The VC allocation is 40% funds and 60% directs and co-investments.

“Our differentiator is governance. In our past careers, we were able to scale a company from a few hundred people to 350,000 while at the same time deploying world-class governance processes that match that scale,” M.D. Ranganath, Catamaran’s chairman and also an Infosys alumnus, recently told AVCJ.

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Expansion
• Trade sale
• Consumer
• Technology
• India
• TMT
• Softbank
• Family office