Elevation Capital to write larger early-stage cheques with new fund

Early-stage venture capital firm Elevation Capital has said that its new $670 million fund -- its largest till date -- will help the company write larger cheques for its early-stage investments. 

Investment sizes in seed and Series A stages, the core areas where it will continue to make bets, will begin with a typical ticket size of $2-5 million, the company said in response to Business Today’s queries. Elevation Capital said it will keep investing in its portfolio firms over subsequent rounds.  

In its 20-year investing history, Elevation Capital has invested almost $2 billion of capital in over 150 companies across seven funds. Of which, 13 of them have gone on to become unicorns, or companies with over $1 billion valuation. 

Its first dedicated fund for India was created in 2011 with a corpus of $350 million, which was followed by two more funds with the same corpus in 2014 and 2018. The fourth India-focused fund and seventh in its history was closed at $400 million in 2020. 

Last year was a significant one for Elevation Capital as it marked one of its largest returns when its portfolio firm Paytm went public. According to disclosures made in the draft offer document of Paytm’s IPO, two of its subsidiaries -- SAIF III Mauritius Company and Elevation Capital V FII Holdings -- ranked in nearly 140 times and 29 times returns, respectively, on their investments.  

The investment firm also saw six of its portfolio companies -- Meesho, NoBroker, Acko, Urban Company, Spinny and ShareChat -- achieving unicorn status in 2021. 

Formerly known as SAIF Partners, Elevation Capital announced the close of its new fund -- Fund VIII -- at $670 million on Friday. 

 “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 company pointed out in a blog post.

Elevation said it will continue to bet on Seed and Series A stage ideas. “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,” it said. 

Other significant names in its portfolio are Acko, FirstCry, Makemytrip, Spinny, Swiggy, Unacademy, Urban Company, and Xpressbees.

“A long-term commitment to the conviction of the founders and their vision is the cornerstone of our approach. It is because of this ethos that we do not make competing investments. Once we decide to back a founder in a space, we keep an unwavering resolve to not “hedge our bets” by investing in multiple companies in that space,” the blog post read. 

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