Silicon Valley-headquartered venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners raised USD 500 million on July 12, 2022. The recent funding of the company is a part of its global fundraise of USD 7 billion.
Purpose of Fundraise by Lightspeed
The recent corpus of USD 500 million is to fund startups in India and Southeast Asia. The company seeks to deepen its commitment to investing in early-stage startups across these regions.
The size of Lightspeed’s fourth India fund increased substantially as compared to its previous USD 275 million corpus of 2020.
Lightspeed seeks investment opportunities in sectors such as cross-border commerce, mobility, artificial intelligence-based automation and DevOps, climate and web3, consumer tech, Business-to-Business commerce and enterprise. Meanwhile, the company continues to back growth-stage companies in the region from its Select and Opportunity fund vehicles.
With the recent deal Bejul Somaia, a partner at the firm’s India arm, has been promoted to a global role, i.e. a global leadership team. Besides, Somaia will also serve on an advisory role in investments in India, Southeast Asia and Europe.
What the Lightspeed Officials have to say
“In the early 2000s, Lightspeed started building a global footprint given our conviction that the future of technology and entrepreneurship would be global. Today, Lightspeed has 70 investors located across twelve cities globally. By intentionally constructing cross-border deal teams, we’re able to offer founders local market knowledge and relationships, together with deep sector domain knowledge. In doing so, we’re all exposed to, and are learning from, the innovation that is happening across the world in order to better serve our founders,” said Bejul Somaia.
“We pride ourselves on being the first institutional capital behind our founders and having the patience, persistence and capital to help build companies from one employee to thousands, from day one to IPO,” said Nicole Quinn, Partner, Lightspeed
“Lightspeed believes in investing at the earliest stages of innovation, partnering with generational entrepreneurs who have clarity of vision, an insatiable desire to build something enduring, and the conviction and courage to compete and win against all odds,” said Arif Janmohamed, Partner, Lightspeed.
“We predominantly lead seed and Series A rounds from the venture fund, so our ticket sizes have ranged from a few hundred thousand to high single-digit million dollars. We also selectively lead Series B investments from the early fund and draw capital from our global growth funds for later stage growth rounds,” said Shuvi Shrivastava, Partner, Lightspeed.
“For early-stage investments in India and South East Asia, we will draw capital from the dedicated $500m regional early-stage fund. For larger growth stage investment opportunities, we will be investing out of the USD 5 billion global growth capital pool,” said Aditya Sharma, Partner, Growth Equity, Lightspeed.
About Lightspeed Venture Partners
Since its inception in 2007, the company has invested over USD 1 billion in India. In the last five years, the firm has expanded to 28 professionals across four locations such as Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai and Singapore.
The firm boasts a global presence of 12 offices across six countries. Its stellar portfolio includes big giants such as Indian Energy Exchange, Oyo, Byju’s, Grab, Acko, Razorpay, Udaan, Sharechat and Innovaccer.
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