Lightbox Venture secures $178 Mn for third fund

Early stage VC firm Lightbox Venture has raised its third fund of about $178 million. The firm has set a target of $200 million in funds for Lightbox Ventures III.

According to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, the Mumbai-based venture capital has so far raised capital from 19 limited partners, which officially began accepting investment on September 3.

With the third fund, the total capital raised by Lightbox now has crossed over $370 mark. In its earlier fund closed, it had raised $38.2 million for Fund I, and about $100 for Fund II.

In 2016, Lightbox had last raised an add-on fund of $54 million of Fund II to invest in its existing portfolio startups which includes Faasos, Embibe, Furlenco, Droom, and several others.

The firm also had a decent exit from Embibe, when Reliance acquired whole stakes from the existing investors of the edtech startup.

Floated by Sandeep Murthy and later joined by Siddharth Talwar, Prashant Mehta, Jeremy Wenokur and Sunny Rao as original partners, Lightbox essentially invests in the range of $3-5 million in early-stage startups in healthcare, consumer technology space, and e-commerce.

Apart from the aforementioned startups, it has also invested in InMobi, Cleartri, Naukri, and Greendust.

Of late, Sequoia India became the largest VC fund after it closed its sixth fund at $695 million. Initially, the firm had, however, set a target of $1 billion. Last month, Matrix Partners had also raised $300 million for its third India-dedicated fund.

Besides, Lightspeed Venture Partners had closed its second India fund with a corpus of $175 Mn and Indian Angel Network (IAN) raised Rs 227 crore for its maiden fund.

The development was reported by Crunchbase news.