Kedaara Capital has marked the final close of its fourth fund, raising the largest corpus by any Indian private equity firm till date, VCCircle has learnt.
The PE firm, which counts eyewear unicorn Lenskart, SaaS firm Perfios and ASG Eye Hospital among its portfolio companies, wrapped up the fundraising activities for the new vehicle at around $1.74 billion (about Rs 14,500 crore).
This is also possibly the quickest fundraising in the Indian PE landscape as Kedaara had started raising the new fund at the end of last year.
A Kedaara spokesperson confirmed the PE firm had hit the final close of the fund.
People tracking the fundraise told VCCircle earlier that the fund received positive response from global limited partners (LPs) as Kedaara showed a good divestment track record with increased value of distributed to paid-in capital (DPI) via exits, both through public listings and strategic sales, and also has a stable top management team.
Kedaara is led by founders and managing partners Manish Kejriwal, Sunish Sharma and Nishant Sharma.
The fourth fund, like its three predecessors, would typically look for investment opportunities in sectors including financial services, consumer and consumer-tech, healthcare and pharma, and technology and tech services like SaaS. The fund would like to make both control and minority deals. The sweet spot would be somewhere between $75 million and $150 million. With co-investments, the fund may even look for much larger transactions.
The fund recently struck a fresh investment in ice-cream brand Dairy Day, in a deal that also gave an exit to the company’s earlier backer Motilal Oswal PE in the process.
Kedaara had raised about $1.1 billion for its third fund in 2021. Some of the key investments struck from that vehicle included Perfios, beauty and personal care ecommerce platform Purplle, and dermatology chain Oliva Skin & Hair Clinic. The firm has deployed around 80% of the corpus, VCCircle has gathered.
The new fundraising milestone came at a time when several larger homegrown PE funds are struggling to convince LPs to write big cheques amidst global volatility leading to cash crunch.
VCCircle previously reported that True North, one of the oldest private equity firms in India, might mop up a lower corpus than envisaged earlier for its seventh fund.
However, there have been instances of funds getting positive responses due to their track record. In September last year, VCCircle reported that mid-market PE firm Stakeboat Capital marked the final close with oversubscription.
