Matrix Partners has raised an amount of $110 million to boost the corpus of its second fund. The venture firm will now have a total corpus of about $400 million in its second fund, which was first set up in 2011. The corpus has been raised from the existing investors.
Apart from fund raise, its Co-founder Rishi Navani is also leaving the firm, which will now be managed by Co-founder Avnish Bajaj along with managing directors Vikram Vaidyanathan and Tarun Davda. Bajaj is a Harvard Business School alumnus who Co-founded one of India's earliest eCommerce ventures — Baazee. com, set up Matrix Partners in 2006 along with Navani.
Bajaj also said that the firm expects to raise a third fund in the second half of 2017. With the newly raised fund, Matrix aims to invest across seed and Series-A deals in later-stage companies. It will target areas like online marketplaces, financial technology, software, logistics and healthcare technology, among others.
After leaving the venture, Navani will continue to work with several portfolio companies of Matrix Partners and he is likely to set up a new investment firm, which will focus on growth-stage investment in tech companies and, also invest in the public markets, as per people familiar with the development.
Recent investment of Matrix Partners India
- Earlier this month, BuddyBB, a location-based mobile application that helps people rent friends and family, announced its Series A funding of $ 2M led by Matrix Partners India.
- In March, Matrix Partners India has invested in the fin-tech startup Finomena.
- In February, OfBusiness, an online marketplace for business to business commerce, raised a Series A funding of $5M led by Matrix Partners India.
- In December 2015, India Value Fund Advisors (IVFA) had invested Rs.400 crores for a significant minority stake in Cloudnine, along with existing investors Matrix Partners India and Sequoia India, who had invested in Cloudnine in its initial phase of growth and in the same month, Amazon, Vertex Ventures, Qualcomm and ru-Net Technology Partners and Matrix Partners India invested around Rs. 150 crore in series B round of funding in Housejoy.
Just yesterday, White Unicorn Ventures also announced its plans to raise a $20-million fund to invest in early-stage companies. The firm is in talks with investors in Germany and Silicon Valley for the purpose and aims to spend up to $5 million by the end of 2016, five times as much as it did last year.
Advertisements