Weekly rundown: Elevation Capital closes $670 mn fund, Dailyhunt raises $805 mn

Early-stage venture capital firm Elevation Capital has closed its latest India-focused fund -- Fund VIII -- at $670 million. 

The new fund, its largest till date, will make seed and Series A investments, beginning with a typical ticket size of $2-5 million. 

The company said it will keep investing in its portfolio firms over subsequent rounds. In its 20 years of 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. Last year was a significant one for Elevation Capital as it marked one of its largest returns when its portfolio firm Paytm went public. 

Also Read: Elevation Capital announces $670 mn fund to invest in early-stage Indian start-ups

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

In what could be a clear sign of the robustness of the Indian start-up funding environment, the week also saw the largest start-up funding round of the year at $805 million, which is larger than Elevation's biggest ever India fund. 
Interestingly, the round was raised by VerSe Innovation Pvt. Ltd, the parent of news aggregator Dailyhunt, which is the primary rival of Elevation Capital's portfolio firm ShareChat. 

The round was led by Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments).  It infused $425 million while the rest of the amount came from existing and new investors, including Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board (Ontario Teachers'), Luxor Capital, Sumeru Ventures, Sofina Group, Baillie Gifford and others. The round valued the company at $5 billion. 

The other high-value investment was raised by Instoried, an AI-based content firm, from GEM Global Yield LLC, an alternative investment group. 

Under the agreement, GEM will provide a Share Subscription Facility of up to $200 million, to be drawn at the option of the company, for a 36-month term following a public listing. 

Also Read: VerSe Innovation raises $805 mn; valuation zooms to $5 bn

The company said it will use the fresh capital to expand its global marketing efforts, primarily in the United States, and invest in its technology to add a Google Chrome extension, a WordPress plug-in, and other elements to its product portfolio. 

The week also a handful of other investment firms making fund announcements, including impact fund Aavishkaar Capital and agritech venture capital firm Omnivore. 

Aavishkaar Capital, the impact investing arm of the Aavishkaar Group, marked the first close of its eighth fund at $130 million while Omnivore announced plans of to raise $130 million third fund to back early-stage startups developing breakthrough technologies for agriculture, food, climate, and rural economy.

Speciale Invest, a seed-stage VC investing in deep science and enterprise technologies, announced its second fund's final closure at Rs 286 crore. 

The fund, which has backed start-ups such as Agnikul, The ePlane Company, CynLr, and Airboxr, will look to invest in 20+ early-stage start-ups through pre-seed and seed rounds with the average cheque sizes ranging from $100,000 to $1 million. 

Speciale invests in start-ups building enterprise software products including SAAS, developer tools and frontier technologies including climate, advanced materials, space tech, robotics, photonics, and alternative energy in India well as some parts of Asia. 

Beams Fintech Fund (Beams), a growth-stage fintech Fund, announced the first close of its maiden fund within three months of its official launch. 

The company said it has already received commitments of up to Rs 270 crore or $36 million for the fund and is in the advanced stage of completing the documentation. 

Beams will back growth-stage companies operating at the intersection of financial services and technology sector. The fund aims to hit the target corpus of Rs 750 crores or $100 million within the next nine months.

In the start-up merger and acquisition space, conversational messaging platform Gupshup snapped up Active.Ai, a conversational AI platform for banks and fintech companies. 

The acquisition is expected to strengthen Gupshup's customer experience solutions for BFSI customers. 
Headquartered in Singapore, Active.Ai serves BFSI customers across 43 countries with a Conversational Banking as a Service (CBaaS) platform that helps clients engage with consumers. 

Active.Ai claims to have enabled more than 300 million user interactions via voice, video and messaging, managed over 30 million service requests and fulfilled 50 million-plus enquiries in aggregate, with 95 per cent accuracy.