Lightspeed, backer of startups like BYJU’s, Oyo, Razorpay, and ShareChat, has launched a $500 million fund dedicated to India and South East Asia to double down on early-stage bets.

“In the early 2000s, Lightspeed started building a global footprint given our conviction that the future of technology and entrepreneurship would be global. Today, Lightspeed has 70 investors located across 12 cities globally,” said Bejul Somaia, Partner, Lightspeed.

“By intentionally constructing cross-border deal teams, we're able to offer founders local market knowledge and relationships, together with deep sector domain knowledge. In doing so, we're all exposed to, and are learning from, the innovation that is happening across the world in order to better serve our founders,” Somaia added.

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Lightspeed India is not alone in launching a larger fund for Indian startups this year amid a funding winter. Other global VC firms like Sequoia Capital raised $2.85 billion to fund startups in India, Southeast Asia. Matrix Partners India also started the process to raise a larger fourth fund of $450 million. Accel India, raised $650 million for its seventh fund in March.

Alongside India IV fund, the Silicon Valley-headquartered VC firm has also announced the closing of Fund XIV with $1.98 billion, Select Fund V with $2.26 billion, and Lightspeed Opportunity Fund II with $2.36 billion of committed capital.

With this, Lightspeed has raised over $7 billion to fund early- and growth-stage entrepreneurs around the globe, 60 percent more than its last flagship fundraise. The company said with the fresh capital, it will focus on expanding its early stage bets and supporting its large and growing global platform.

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The VC firm has also unveiled Lightspeed Faction, an independent team dedicated to building on the company’s nine-year history of backing founders in blockchain infrastructure, a statement said.

Lightspeed has partnered with more than 500 enterprise, consumer, health and fintech founders and their companies. Roughly a fourth of those companies have either been acquired or gone public, with 33 IPOs over the years, it added.

The firm has invested over $1.5 billion in close to 100 global fintech companies including $600 million specifically in blockchain and emerging use cases.

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First Published:Jul 12, 2022 5:46 PM IST