Jio set to raise Rs 6,598 Cr from General Atlantic for 1.34% stake

Within a month Reliance Industries Limited-owned Jio has secured four rounds of investments in a row from overseas entities. After Facebook, Silverlake, and Vista Equity, Jio is all set to raise Rs 6598.38 crore from US-based investment firm General Atlantic.

This investment values Jio Platforms at an equity value of Rs 4.91 lakh crore and an enterprise value of Rs 5.16 lakh crore. General Atlantic’s investment will translate into a 1.34% equity stake in Jio Platforms on a fully diluted basis.

With this investment, Jio Platforms has raised Rs 67,194.75 crore from the likes of Facebook, Silver Lake, Vista Equity Partners and General Atlantic. This is General Atlantic’s biggest bet in the Asian continent.

While Facebook acquired a 9.9% stake in the Indian telecom giant for Rs 43,574 crore, private equity firm Silver Lake Partners owned a 1.15% stake in Jio Platforms for about Rs 5,655.75 crore. On the other hand, Vista Equity had picked up a 2.32% stake on a fully diluted basis for Rs 11,637 crore.

“General Atlantic shares our vision of a Digital Society for India and strongly believes in the transformative power of digitization in enriching the lives of 1.3 billion Indians. We are excited to leverage General Atlantic’s proven global expertise and strategic insights across 40 years of technology investing for the benefit of Jio,” said Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director of RIL.

The back to back investments in Jio is emphasizing the fact that heavyweight overseas investors believe that Jio will have the edge over others in online to offline space. The company had recently started taking orders online (via WhatsApp) and fulfill them with the network of retailers on Jio Mart.

Several media reports outlined that Jio may leverage WhatsApp to launch WeChat kind of super app. However, it’s unlikely as Facebook never did such thing globally and Jio has its ecosystem with over four dozen apps.

General Atlantic is a global growth equity firm focused on investing in the technology, consumer, financial services, and healthcare sectors. The investment firm has backed global companies such as Airbnb, Alibaba, Ant Financial, Box, ByteDance, Facebook, Slack, Snapchat, Uber, and other comprehensive technology leaders. It counts Byju’s, Unacademy, NoBroker in its local portfolio.