Early–stage venture capital fund Elevation Capital has announced its VIII fund with a corpus of $670 million which will be focused on investing in young start-ups in India. Elevation Capital, which has backed the likes of Paytm, Swiggy, Meesho, among others, said in a blog post that Elevation’s Fund VIII is one of the largest India-focused venture platforms to date. Over the past two decades, the fund has invested almost $2 billion of capital in over 150 companies with 13 early-stage investments becoming unicorns in India.
“It will enable us to continue being a pivotal catalyst for Indian founders to fulfill their aspirations. Fund VIII will allow us to demonstrate a greater commitment to exceptional founders with a larger initial investment and continued support to them until much later in their journeys,” the VC fund said.
Elevation Capital also said that it will continue to focus on the Seed/Series A stage companies.
“Early-stage investing is where we have found our ikigai — the perfect intersection of our capabilities, passion, and the needs of the founder ecosystem. As a result, our investment pace has been accelerating and went up by 100 per cent, just in the past 12 months,” as per an official handout.
The announcement comes at a crucial juncture when the start-up ecosystem is witnessing some headwinds in investments from the large funds/ investors overseas due to the impact of ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict on tech stocks/ markets.
Elevation Capital, however, said that the fund continues to remain focused on India.
“India’s equity market capitalisation is already the fifth-highest in the world at $3.2 trillion and is expected to approach $10 trillion over the next 10 years. Given that the Indian startup ecosystem has an even stronger outlook, we are further convinced that we have just scratched the surface of India’s tech potential. The 100 unicorns in India alone have a combined valuation of $240 billion. We believe that this will grow over 10x over the next decade and Indian tech companies will have more than $2 trillion of market cap,” the VC fund stated.