Fireside Ventures has hit the final close of its second fund at Rs 863 crore (around $118 million), Kanwaljit Singh, founder and managing partner at the early-stage consumer-focused venture fund said at an online press conference on Wednesday.
This means the venture capital firm has overshot its original target corpus of $100 million for the new fund.
Limited Partners (LPs), or investors, in the new fund include Small Industries Development Bank of India (Sidbi), fund of funds Nippon India Digital Innovation AIF Fund, Investment Corporation of Dubai, PremjiInvest, Bajaj Holdings and Investment Ltd and Pidilite.
Dipanjan Basu, partner, Fireside, told VCCircle that the fund has a healthy mix of LPs, of which 30-40% are returning investors. Basu also said that 25-30% commitments for the fund have come from global LPs.
The final close milestone comes on the heels of Fireside’s portfolio firm boAt grabbing $100 million from private equity firm Warburg Pincus.
Basu said that Fireside made a partial exit during the transaction and the returns exceeded expectations.
Venture capital and private equity firms typically chase an internal rate of return (IRR) of 20-30% in rupee terms.
Singh said that the key question raised by most LPs was on the scalability of brands and how much capital they require. "So exits like this (from boAt) are a very good testimony to the fact that we could deliver superior returns and not just from one company," he added.
He said that six of Fireside’s portfolio companies have already crossed Rs 100 crore in turnover and expects over 50% of the firms to provide healthy returns.
Fireside, founded in 2017, had hit the first close of the new fund in November 2019. It had not disclosed the amount at which it hit the first close but had said the fund had received commitments of over $60 million.
Just months before the announcement of the first close, Fireside's new fund had roped in French cosmetics giant L'Oréal as one of the LPs.
The second fund has already made four investments including those in yoga and wellness startup Sarva Yoga, womenswear brand FableStreet and ayurveda brand Gynoveda.
Final closes
Earlier this month, early-stage venture capital firm Endiya Partners marked the final close of the new fund, meeting its corpus target of Rs 500 crore ($70 million).
Last year, marquee investors including Sequoia, Elevation Capital (formerly SAIF Partners) and Lightspeed India Partners marked the final close of new funds.
Smaller homegrown venture capital firms such as Blume Ventures and Equanimity Investments also marked the final close while Unicorn India Ventures and Inflexor Ventures registered the first close of their funds.
