Sequoia Capital India launches separate seed fund for local startups

Sequoia Capital India, the largest India focussed VC investing in the country’s startups, has launched a separate Seed fund for Indian startups.

The VC had recently sharpened focus on the early-stage startups with its incubation programme Surge, which is well on its way to graduate a cohort of 8 startups including Azani Sports, Flynote, Skillmatics, DoubtNut, Bulbulshop and others.

The aim with the Surge is to recruit 10-12 such startups in two cohorts in a year and invest $1.5 million in each of them.

Now, Sequoia Capital India Seed Fund I Ltd registered in Mauritius is going to raise a separate fund to be invested as seed rounds in Indian startups and this fund with an undisclosed corpus will be raised within a year.

The focus of this fund will be on technology, healthcare, and consumer segments.

Before Surge and the newly launched early-stage fund, Sequoia has been a major investor in firms like Ola, Zomato, MuSigma etc. It even has two investment teams - growth and venture - that run its investments in these two categories.

Now with the incubation programme and the seed fund, early-stage startups in the country are attracting a special focus from the largest investor in India.

The size of the seed fund, as well as the average ticket size,  is yet to be disclosed.

The Sequoia Capital’s currently is investing through its sixth fund in India and Southeast Asia, a fund that had closed at $695 million in August last year.

The launch of the new seed fund is an important development looking at how new startups in the consumer tech as well as B2B tech are opening up every other day creating a huge demand for early-stage investment where the supply still has a huge scope to increase.

With Sequoia’s special focus, the number and size of seed funding are expected to improve significantly in the market.

The development was reported by VCCircle.