Mayfield Fund, a global VC firm with $3 billion under management, has closed its second India-dedicated fund at $108 million. As per a SEC disclosure, the firm raised a total of $108.1 million through nine investors.
Mayfield India II is the successor to Mayfield India I which had raised $111 million in late 2008 and VC firm has been investing in the country through this fund. As first reported by VCCircle, the firm had reached $86 million in investor commitment for the second fund last month, over a year after it launched the process.
“While the macro-economic climate has varied since we started investing in India in 2006, we have learned that India continues to present valuable opportunities to technology and non-technology investors. Two of our key takeaways are that tech-enabled infrastructure solutions can create great value and lifestyle and entertainment products aimed at the consumer middle class can grow into universal brands,†said Mayfield’s MD Navin Chaddha.
“In addition, we believe that mobile companies aimed at the 700 million mobile users and tech and tech-enabled services represent the future in India,†he added.
Mayfield is one of the oldest venture capital firms from Silicon Valley. Although Mayfield is a technology-focused investor in Silicon Valley, it has also been an active venture investor in non-technology companies in India. Mayfield follows an early-stage venture capital strategy in India, and invests $2-8 million in companies targeting the infrastructure sector, tech and tech-enabled services and the consumer.
Mayfield’s portfolio companies include Bharat Matrimony (India’s largest matrimony company), Dealsandyou (a daily deals portal), Geodesic Techniques (a specialty construction company), Beer Cafe (a resto bar chain) and Securens (alarms system monitoring). Its earlier investments include PayMate India and Tejas Networks. Several of Mayfield's portfolio companies have managed to raise follow on rounds of funding at a higher valuation.
Invests in Elastica
Mayfield has invested $6.3 million in Series A round of funding in California-based Elastica Inc, a provider of cloud security applications for enterprises. As part of the deal, Mayfield's managing director Navin Chaddha has joined the board of Elastica.
With this funding round, Elastica has also come out of its stealth mode and launched CloudSOC, a cloud audit granular transaction visibility, threat detection, security controls and post-incident forensic analysis.
“We are focused on enabling the elastic enterprise, where companies can achieve the business agility, collaborative capabilities and cost efficiencies to effectively compete in today’s market. By harnessing advanced data science and machine learning, our unique solution provides a missing piece to securing cloud services and applications so that this vision of an Elastic Enterprise can become reality,†said Elastica president and CEO Rehan Jalil.
Elastica was founded in 2012 by Jalil, an alumnus of Harvard Business School. He previously founded WiChorus, which was acquired by Tellabs Inc in 2009. He was also a venture advisor at Mayfield Fund.
Elastica’s products enable companies to leverage cloud applications and services while staying safe, secure and compliant. The firm has more than 65 team members with expertise in data science, big data analytics, security, real-time stream processing, modern visualisation and web-scale deployments.
“Elastica is solving a big security pain point for enterprises as they adopt cloud and allow their employees to have access to cloud services from any device,†said Navin Chaddha.
(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)
