Venture capital firm Matrix Partners India said on Wednesday it has closed fundraising for its third fund at $300 million (Rs 2,116 crore at current exchange rates).
The announcement comes nearly five months after the firm said in a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it had raised $300 million for the third fund and less than a month after another filing showed it had topped up the fund by $20.7 million.
The VC firm declined to comment on the total size of the third fund, Matrix Partners India III, LLC.
It also didn’t specify who the limited partners, or investors, were in the third fund, saying only that it counts university endowments, foundations and financial institutions across North America, Europe and the Middle East as its investors.
The venture capital firm will continue to follow its strategy of “backing exceptional founders” across sectors, it said in a statement.
“This is an exciting time to be an entrepreneur in India – mobile internet-led leapfrogging is underway across sectors and increasing GDP (gross domestic product) per person and consumerism will have a multiplier effect on scaling-up businesses," said Avnish Bajaj, founder and managing director, Matrix Partners India.
Incorporated in 2006, Matrix Partners India has over the years changed from a quasi-private-equity investor to a conventional venture capital firm with a focus on tech startups.
The venture capital firm, which was started by Bajaj and Rishi Navani, had launched its first fund with a corpus of $150 million and later topped it up to $300 million. Subsequently, it raised $300 million for its second fund in 2011.
Five years later, when talks of floating a new fund were doing the rounds, Matrix Partners announced the extension of the second fund by $110 million in 2016.
The same year, Navani quit Matrix Partners to float a new investment firm named Epiq Capital.
Other managing directors in Matrix Partners India are Tarun Davda and Vikram Vaidyanathan.
Matrix has so far backed more than 60 companies including cab-hailing firm Ola, mobile payment services firm Mswipe, digital healthcare firm Practo and social commerce platform Limeroad.
Last month, Matrix Partners, along with Ventureast, made a new investment in California- and Bengaluru-based marketing cloud platform MoEngage Inc.
Matrix joins a bunch of venture capital firms including Sequoia Capital India, Nexus Venture Partners and Lightspeed India Partners which had announced fundraising milestones last year.
