Helion Venture Partners raised its second fund with a $210 million corpus early this month. It is the only venture capital firm in India at present that has raised two funds within 20 months. The first fund, $140 million, was raised in August 2006. The second fund has been raised primarily from investors in the US and the list includes a few university endowments. Helion has piled up deals rapidly in the past year and it is not surprising that they needed to raise a second fund so quickly. Fund I has invested in 11 companies and is over 50 per cent invested now.
Last week I caught up with Helion co-founder Kanwaljit Singh in Mumbai and found out more about the investment plans from Fund II. The original theme doesn’t change much — technology-powered businesses but the firm has now added consumer services to its plank. The firm thinks that some interesting early stage business models are beginning to emerge in that area and a solo focus on technology cannot sustain deal-flow in the Indian market beyond a point. Incidentally, the first venture capital firm to focus on the consumer theme in India was Mumbai-based Matrix Partners.
Helion is beefing up its team to manage the expanded focus. The investment team will add one more to the current four, which includes Singh, Sanjeev Aggarwal, Ashish Gupta and Rahul Chandra, and a couple of folks on the operating side. So what kind of consumer niches are looking interesting? “Maybe speciality retail, financial services, education,” says Singh, who earlier led Carlyle’s venture capital investments in India.
The new focus will not see a scale up in deal ticket sizes. The per deal ticket size cap remains $10 million. It may look at more mature businesses than usual but the firm does not see that affecting its focus on early-stage start-ups. The portfolio so far has been quite well balanced — six in the seed-to-early stage and five in the mid-to-growth stage. Some of the companies in the portfolio include Kirusa, Mindworks, Jigrahak and MakeMyTrip.
Image Courtesy: Helion Venture Partners
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