Nexus Venture Partners closes its largest-ever fund at $700 million

Nexus Ventures VII will continue to back entrepreneurs in the US and India, across segments such as artificial intelligence, software-as-a-service (SaaS), fintech, and commerce, the firm said in a company blog.

In the past, Nexus has been an aggressive backer of India’s SaaS story, having several new-age unicorns from the segment in its portfolio.

“With one of the largest developer bases in the world, India is emerging as a key innovation and talent hub for global companies driving AI and software revolution. India is also amongst the fastest-growing economies on the planet, with accelerating digital consumption powered by the best-in-class mobile data networks and advanced payments infrastructure,” the venture fund said in its prepared statement.

Limited partners in the Nexus fund include several global pension funds, family offices as well as endowment funds, the firm said. The fund close comes at a time when the technology industry globally and in India has seen a major shift as companies cut costs due to investors pulling back from public and private markets.

Venture capital funding for startups fell 30% in 2022 to $23.95 billion compared to the record highs of 2021, when Indian new-age companies raised $35.46 billion in investments, ET had reported earlier citing data from research platform, Venture Intelligence.

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Founded in 2006 by Naren Gupta, Sandeep Singhal and Suvir Sujan, Nexus Venture Partners was one of the first Indian venture capital firms to invest in software startups across India and the US. Gupta passed away in 2021.The fund is an early investor in logistics tech startup Delhivery which went in May last year.

Other notable initial public offerings (IPOs) from its portfolio include Pubmatic, which listed on the US-exchanges in 2021.

Other fund closures

In June last year, Sequoia Capital raised $2.85 billion to deploy across startups in India and Southeast Asia, the largest dedicated corpus for the region by a risk investor. It is expected to utilise $2 billion across its India venture and growth investments, while the remaining will go to the Southeast Asia companies.

Some of the VC funds which raised last year include Flipkart and Freshworks backer, Accel, and Elevation Capital, formerly Saif Partners, which mopped up $650 million and $670 million in total corpus, respectively.

Early-stage investor Chiratae Ventures also launched its growth fund last year, announcing Rs 759 crore as its first close. Other early stage funds including – Athera Venture Partners (formerly Inventus Capital) and Axilor Ventures have also launched their latest funds.

Global investors focused on the India opportunity such as B Capital have also closed their latest growth funds to ramp up India investments.