Venture Highway raises $78.6 Mn for its second India focused seed fund

Early-stage venture capital firm, Venture Highway, has raised $78.6 million for its second fund focused on seed investments in India as it is looking to double down on investing in early-stage startups in the country.

The five-year-old venture, which had backed startups like Meesho, Sharechat, Cras24, OkCredit, Moglix, O4S, Wishfin, and WMall in their early days, will deploy the new investments to back around thirty early-stage companies over the life of this fund. 

According to several reports, the VC firm has already made several investments through its second funds such as OkCredit, MPL, O4S, WMall, CityFurnish, MyScoot and MyPetrolPump.

The Venture Highway LLP entity was bootstrapped and founded by former Google executive Samir Sood and is advised by Neeraj Arora. Backed by iconic investors from Silicon Valley, it partners with capital-efficient technology businesses and adds value through their global and local networks.

Also, this is the first time Venture Highway has raised money from LPs. The average cheque size for this fund is expected to be a million dollars. 

Venture Highway has now become an institution to help drive the early-stage technology ecosystem in India. Some of its other early investments have been in renowned startups such as Moglix, Tracxn, Cars24, and Wishfin.

Headquartered in Mauritius with teams and advisors based in the US, Mauritius and in India, Venture Highway's first fund had made over 20 investments.

In the past six months, several VC firms focusing on seed and early-stage startups in India, have been raising new corpus. Of them, Accel India had closed the largest fund size for seed and early-stage investment at $550 million. Apart from that Indian Angel Network (IAN), DSG Consumer Partners and 3one4 Capital have also closed their targeted funds.

In September, last year, Investopad's co-founders had floated an early-stage venture capital firm – Good Capital. A pure-play micro venture capital firm with a corpus of $25 million, Good Capital will invest across pre-seed to Series A in consumer Internet and enterprise-focused startups.