Exclusive: Nexus Venture Partners set to raise over $500 Mn new corpus

Early-stage venture capital firm Nexus Venture Partners is in talks to raise up to $550 million worth sixth fund, said three people aware of the details of the conversation. When this goes through, it will be the largest corpus raised by the homegrown VC firm to date.

“Nexus Venture Partners has been in late-stage talks with existing and new limited partners [LPs] for about three-four months,” said one of the sources requesting anonymity. “It has set a target of $550 million in the fresh fund.”

Nexus has been known for making bets on Snapdeal, WhiteHat Jr Unacademy, Delhivery and SaaS unicorns Postman and Druva. The VC firm had raised about $450 million in its fifth fund in 2019.

“The sixth fund is in line with the firm’s conviction to have a larger fund to compete holistically with the likes of Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners,” said the second person who also wished not to be named.

According to its website, Nexus has a portfolio of over 100 companies. Entrackr’s immediate queries to Nexus remained unanswered. We will update the story in case they respond.

Founded by Suvir Sujan, Sandeep Singhal and Naren Gupta, Nexus is a 15-years-old VC firm and one of the country’s first homegrown venture investors. The company recently scored 28X return on its one-and-a-half-year long bet on edtech startup WhiteHat Jr. 

Nexus exited with $140 million cash on its $5 million bet on the Karan Bajaj-founded company when Byju’s acquired it last year. According to data from Venture Intelligence, the firm has made exits worth $500 million since its inception in 2006.

Among larger size venture funds that have been launched for Indian startups in the past 12 months is Sequoia Capital’s $1.3 billion worth corpus for India and SEA region. 

BEENEXT also raised a $110 million fresh fund in June 2020 followed by Lightspeed Venture Partners had marked the close of its third India-focused fund at $275 million. In October 2020, SAIF Partners, which rebranded itself as Elevation Capital, also announced the close of its seventh fund at $400 million. 

The new corpus by Nexus will be greater than the above-mentioned firm and would help it to go more aggressive (on the lines of Accel, Sequoia and Lightspeed) on early-stage investment along with follow-on rounds in the existing portfolio companies.