VC investment exits in India record four-fold rise to $19.6 Bn in 2018: Report

The Venture Capital (VC) investors in India have recorded a four-fold rise in exits in nine months this year.

They recorded exits worth $19.6 billion in 2018 as compared to $4.2 billion in last year, according to a recent report co-authored by Bain and Company and the Indian Venture Capital Association (IVCA).

With VC being more selective and choosy on their bets, the landscape has been shifting from the scale-up phase to the maturing phase, noted the report. The number of deals has declined whereas deal sizes have increased across all investment stages.

The exit momentum is expected to go up in coming years. About 80 per cent of start-up founders expects investor exits in the next six years.

The bigger VCs are focusing on later-stage investment. About 30 per cent of seed investment and 50 per cent of Series A, B, C investments kept on raising a subsequent round of investments.

In the last decade, the VC deal value grew 5 times whereas in 2017 deal valued at $3.4 billion. In the last four years, the figure has been estimated at $10 billion.

However, the number of VC exits through IPO and buybacks have fallen.

Talking about the growth of the startup ecosystem, the report outlined the presence of high-quality talent that pushed for macroeconomic growth has been further assisted by ecosystem enabler and the regulatory framework in the country.

Globally, the US and China are far ahead of India in most of the metrics including, size of funding, overall ease of doing business and total funded tech start-up base.