SAIF Partners raises $350M fund to foster Indian tech startups

Venture capital firm SAIF Partners has raised $350 million for a new fund to invest in Indian tech startups as well as brick-and-mortar companies. The fund is led by General Partner Ravi Adusumalli, along with managing directors Deepak Gaur, Mukul Arora, Vishal Sood, Alok Goel, and CFO Vivek Mathur. This fresh investment has taken the firm’s assets under management (AUM) over $1 billion. According to Managing Director Deepak Gaur, SAIF will invest 15-20% of the new fund in public companies, with the rest going to early-stage and late-stage Internet investments as well as companies outside the technology space.

“It is a conscious choice to cap it at $350 million. It allows us the flexibility to do very early stage deals and also larger cheques. The fund will have the same strategy. We will continue to do seed, series-A, growth stage and public-listed. It is flexible. In our last fund, we were not very active in series-B, in terms of cheque sizes above $15 million. We are hopeful in this fund we will do much more,” Gaur said in an interview with ET.

The venture capital also plans to become more active in the newer sectors where it has not been very active, such as enterprise, SaaS, education, healthcare and consumer brands. Another sector of interest for the new fund is financial services, said Managing Director Alok Goel. Founded in 2001, SAIF has offices in Bengaluru and Gurugram, and has made over 100 investments since its inception. It was an early investor in digital payments and mobile wallet player Paytm, which had raised a whopping $1.4 billion from Japan’s SoftBank in May this year. The VC firm is known for its unique investment strategy of investing in public companies as well as non-Internet companies, two spaces that most of its rivals avoid.