Venture capital firm Jungle Ventures raises $240 million for third fund

Technology
Jungle Ventures, one of Southeast Asia’s largest early-stage venture capital firms, closed its third fund, Jungle Ventures III by raising a total of $240 million. It includes $40 million raised in separately managed account commitments, for investments in innovative technology and digital-driven consumer businesses across Southeast Asia.
Investors range from endowments, funds of funds, and development financial institutions to strategic family offices and leading technology players. These include DEG, Germany’s development finance institution, IFC, a member of the World Bank Group and Bualuang Ventures, a corporate venture capital fund of Bangkok Bank. Dutch development bank FMO, Cisco Investments and Singapore’s Temasek are other investors in the fund.
“We continue to be focused on Southeast Asia and India. We take concentrated bets and are carefully looking for market-leading companies in India which have an opportunity to scale their business into Southeast Asia and globally,” said Jungle Ventures co-founder and managing partner Anurag Srivastava. “Seven of our early-stage investments from our second fund, Jungle Ventures II, have grown to over $2 billion in portfolio valuation, up more than 10-fold over the last 4 years. This is noteworthy because we make only 10 to 15 key investments in each fund and no single company is responsible for delivering a disproportionate share of this growth,” added Srivastava.

Jungle mainly invests in three verticals which include consumer brands for the digitally native, digital platforms for transforming small and medium enterprises and global technology companies born in Asia. Some of Jungle's notable investments in India include Livspace, Moglix, PaySense, Engineer.Ai, Tookitaki and Klinify.Jungle raised more than double the amount of its previous fund, Jungle Ventures II (2016), with nearly 60 per cent of committed capital coming from outside Asia...READ MORE

Scooter rental start-up Vogo gets Rs 25 crore debt from Alteria Capital

Company News

Scooter rental start-up Vogo has raised Rs 25 crore as debt from Alteria Capital, a Mumbai-based venture debt firm. Alteria Capital first invested in Vogo in August 2018.
“We are thrilled to double down on our partnership with Alteria. Since they first came on board, we have grown over 70X and will leverage this investment to keep growing rapidly and bring Vogo scooters to millions of customers across India.” said Anand Ayyadurai, Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Vogo.
Launched in 2016 by Ayyadurai, Padmanabhan Balakrishnan, and Sanchit Mittal, Vogo offers scooters on rent across five Indian cities. The venture is backed by Stellaris, Matrix Venture Partners and Kalaari Capital.
In December last year, cab-hailing major Ola agreed to invest $100 million in Vogo through a mix of equity and debt, enabling Vogo to add 100,000 new scooters.
“We have seen a rapid growth in this segment over the last 9-12 months and Vogo has consistently surpassed expectations on operating performance and driving demand.
While there are many more execution aspects to tackle as they scale, we feel this team is well placed to emerge as a strong player in the urban mobility category,” said Vinod Murali, Managing Partner, Alteria Capital.

 Alteria Capital is an emerging venture debt fund. With a corpus of Rs 1,000 crore, it has struck deals with Faasos, Portea Medical, Raw Pressery, Dunzo, Vinculum, and Mfine, among others.

Venture capital firm Lightbox invests $4 mn in female wellness startup Nua

Companies News

Venture capital firm Lightbox has made its first investment from its $200 million third fund. It has invested $4 million in Nua, a female wellness brand. Existing investor Kae Capital has also participated in this Series A funding round. Nua, operated by Lagom Labs, creates products and services revolved around women’s health and wellness.

Currently, the firm makes sanitary pads and sells them online. After listening to hundreds of women, Nua co-founders Ravi Ramachandran and Swathi Kulkarni created a solution that is configured to a woman's individual cycle, delivered directly to her home, every month.

“I think in Nua, we found a team that has thought through how to create an amazing experience for women and do it in a manner that is delivering massively amazing value,” said Prashant Mehta, partner at Lightbox, in an interview.

With international brands like Whisper and Stayfree taking up the bulk of the market share in India, Nua is a newcomer in the space. But what differentiates the company is that it works on an innovative direct-to-consumer model where women are able to customise sanitary pad boxes based on their individual needs. It delivers the products to their doorstep on a subscription basis. The firm has also built a strong community of nearly 1 lakh women. Nua said it delivers the easy-to-store and dispose sanitary pads across the country, with tier 2 and tier 3 cities accounting for 50% of sales.


 “If you think about fem-care, there are already companies at the high end of the spectrum, you can always get very high-end products, but this team (Nua) really felt that it was important to bring care and wellness ideas to millions of women and not just the top echelon of women group,” said Mehta of Lightbox--which has backed ventures such as tech company InMobi, Rebel Foods (Faasos) and online travel firm Cleartrip.