Jafco Ventures, a technology venture capital firm, has raised its fifth and largest fund to date with a corpus of $260 million.
Christened Jafco Technology Partners V, the fund has roped in new Limited Partners (LPs) compared with its previous fund. The fresh set of LPs includes over 20 new investors consisting of institutional investors, endowments, foundations and family offices.
"A $250 million fund size is ideal for our business model; so our goal was to keep as close to that target as possible while still accommodating great new investors," says Tom Mawhinney, a General Partner of the firm.
"With this larger fund, we can put more money to work in each investment while continuing to apply a true team-based approach to assisting each portfolio company and to evaluate new deals,” he added.
Jafco has been a consistent investor in India putting money in one-two firms every year and lately been backing application software ventures. Last year it invested in Unmetric.
Previously it had invested in firms like communication equipment firm Tessolve; application software firm Si2 Microsystems; internet firm Apnapaisa; IT consulting firms Mistral Solutions and Microland; industrial machinery company Microqual; education services venture Vriti Infocom and application software firm Vignani Technologies.
Jafco Ventures manages funds of more than $750 million. Recently, Murli Ravi, head of investments for South and Southeast Asia for the fund, joined social commerce company enMarkit as a non-executive director.
Since its inception 10 years ago, the fund has realised over 20 exits. Its successful exits include Aster Data (acquired by Teradata), ClairMail (acquired by Monitise), FireEye (through IPO), 41st Parameter (acquired by Experian), Infinera (IPO), MoPub (acquired by Twitter) besides Palo Alto Networks and Proofpoint (both IPOs).
(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)