Starting a new company is always tough. This year, it’s been even harder. 2020 began with the pandemic – a global humanitarian and economic crisis like none before. It requires more courage than ever to build in these difficult times and we believe that the most mission-driven founders emerge in these circumstances to build the leading companies of the future.
Lightspeed India Partners is strongly committed to backing bold, mission-driven founders. Today, we are deepening this commitment with the closing of Lightspeed India Partners III, a $275 million early-stage fund. Since our inception in India, we have facilitated investments of over $750 million in India.
We are convinced that India’s future will be increasingly digital. In the last five years, India’s digital ecosystem has accelerated, driven by 4G infrastructure, public platforms like India Stack, government initiatives such as GST and Ease of Doing Business, improved depth of founder talent and an expanded community of founders, angel investors and service providers. Digital start-ups are accelerating India’s development path, enabling better lives for all of its citizens.
Our digital ecosystem is maturing, with many more sectors emerging where technology is having a disruptive impact. Ecommerce, tech-enabled services, payments and media have expanded well beyond their 1.0 incarnations. Technology is now, for the first time, coming to the aid of Indian small and medium enterprises (SMEs), in the form of mobile SaaS, financial services, logistics and marketplaces. And we are seeing software product companies emerge in applications/SaaS, artificial intelligence, cloud/infrastructure software and developer tools, many of them built for global enterprises. We are even beginning to see the early shoots of growth in frontier sectors such as space, aviation and biotechnology.
Most importantly, India’s digital ecosystem is producing exceptional founders. We are especially excited by founders who have prescient on-the-ground insights at the very beginning of long-term disruptions in large markets. Our strategy has always been to back such founders early – more than 80% of our investments in the past 13 years have been committed to start-ups at seed or series A stage, the majority of which are pre-product or pre-traction.
Over the last 13 years, Lightspeed India has had the privilege of partnering with many founders who have subsequently built market-leading positions, established new categories and built from India for the world. Byju’s (EdTech), Indian Energy Exchange (Power Marketplace), Innovaccer (Healthcare SaaS), Oyo (Hospitality), Sharechat (Social Media), Udaan (B2B Marketplace) and Yellow Messenger (Conversational AI SaaS) are powerful examples of companies we have partnered deeply with. There are over 50 companies in our active portfolio currently that are on this journey to high impact, many building for Bharat with unique models invented in India.
We see ourselves as more than facilitators of capital, with our engagement with each founding team lasting over a decade. We work with founders to help accelerate their businesses, via work on strategy, talent acquisition, org design, strategic marketing, customer introductions and corporate development. Lightspeed has a global network across US, China, Israel, Southeast Asia and Europe, which helps our founders access Lightspeed-backed founders across the globe. In addition, we bring access to a global capital pool, which includes recently raised Lightspeed growth funds of over $3.2 billion.
A burgeoning but still emerging ecosystem requires more broad-based engagement. Over the last few years, we have expanded the Lightspeed India Advisors partnership to six partners, based out of Delhi and Bengaluru. We are: Harsha Kumar, Vaibhav Agrawal, Akshay Bhushan, Hemant Mohapatra, Dev Khare and Bejul Somaia, one of the largest partner teams focused on India early-stage technology investing.
We are grateful to each and every one of our founders – for their vision of changing lives, their energy and determination, and their passion – which inspires and motivates us the most. Building a start-up isn’t easy and they put their best step forward every day, and we are truly appreciative of that. We are also thankful to our community of co-investors and collaborators whose support is instrumental in growing India’s digital ecosystem.
With this new fund, Lightspeed India remains committed more than ever to its mission of partnering with bold founders, building tomorrow’s companies, today.
Yours,
Team Lightspeed
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