The Indian startup eco-system is again attracting investors after hiccups in the last two years. Startups in India have managed to raise $3.9 billion from venture capitalists in the first half of the year 2019. As per Venture Intelligence, a startup data tracker, the investment has jumped to $3.9 billion from $2.7 billion in the first six months of the running year. The fund infusion happened across 292 deals in domestic startups.
The Mint reported that the investment made during this period is significant with the fact that in 2016 and 2017, the Indian startups managed to raise $4.2 billion and $4.3 billion respectively, highlighting a jump in the investments. The startups are defined under categories such as seed, or very early investments, to Series F deals in companies that are less than 10 years old.
Calling 2018 as a milestone for the market, Sandeep Murthy, managing partner at Lightbox Ventures, said "many companies that have been quietly building and solving truly unique problems have achieved scale".
Murthy, whose fund house has invested at the early stages in online furniture rental start-up Furlenco and cloud kitchen firm Rebel Foods, best further added: "They are now being rewarded with capital that will allow these businesses to continue to grow in many cases profitably." In recent times, consumer internet firms have continued to raise huge capital, business-to-business (B2B) companies in sectors such as logistics, software and marketplace have also managed to raise handsome capital from investors. Murthy also added "2019 has also been about the emergence of Tier II and III cities and B2B models, both of which had been historically underinvested in. Tiger Global has clearly indicated their interest in the B2B space, while Chinese investors seem to be pushing deeper into emerging cities across India."
It is to be noted that some of the recent deals in the Indian start-up segment have attracted investors to India. One of the landmark deals is US retail giant, Walmart's $16 billion acquisition of India's online retailer Flipkart. When the company bought a holding stake in the company, the earlier investors exited with 1.5-10 times their investments. Some of the venture capital firms including Accel Partners, Japan's SoftBank Group Corp., South Africa's Naspers and US-based Tiger Global Management Llc made billions from the deal.
