Nexus Venture Partners, an India-focused venture capital firm with around 50 investments to its credit, is raising a new fund christened Nexus Opportunity Fund Ltd, as per a SEC disclosure.
Although the firm has not shared the target corpus or the investment strategy, according to a report in Asian Venture Capital Journal, this is a top-up fund with a target size of $110 million and it will focus on backing its existing portfolio companies at later stages. As per the report, the fund is participating in the latest funding round in e-commerce marketplace Snapdeal.com, which recently raised a $134 million funding led by eBay Inc, from the new fund.
An email query sent to Nexus Venture Partners’ spokesperson did not immediately elicit a response.
Nexus Venture Partners was launched in 2006 with a $100 million fund and raised a second $220 million fund in 2008. In 2012 it announced the closure of its third fund with commitments of $270 million, taking the assets under management of the early-stage venture capital firm to nearly $600 million.
Nexus Venture Partners was targeting $250 million for the third fund though it managed to raise $270 million as it wanted to accommodate some of the limited partners.
It was set up by Silicon Valley-based Naren Gupta along with Suvir Sujan and Sandeep Singhal.
Nexus Venture Partners focuses on early-stage investments across technology, internet, media, consumer and business services sectors. Besides investing in Indian firms, it has followed a strategy of investing in US-based companies leveraging the India-US corridor.
The venture capital firm has also had quite a few successful exits including NetMagic, Gluster and OLX among others.
The firm also runs a seed programme with investment of up to $500,000. Its key portfolio firms include Snapdeal, Yebhi, Eka Software, Komli Media, PubMatic, Unmetric, Vdopia, Craftsvilla.com and Druva. Last month, Nexus Venture Partners had infused fresh capital in US-based Kaltura, an Open Office-based online video platform. In January this year, it invested in Pune- and Florida-based enterprise security solutions firm Uniken Inc.
(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)
