Norwest Venture Partners, led by Niren Shah, and Alex Cook’s Tiger Global together took the second spot with investments in three companies each, according to the Practus Hurun India PE Performers 2022 report.
Sequoia Capital India, led by Ravishankar GV, was the top private equity (PE) investor in terms of the number of investments into Indian companies in calendar year 2021 among a pool of 103 active PE investors, said a report by Hurun Research Institute.
Norwest Venture Partners, led by Niren Shah, and Alex Cook’s Tiger Global together took the second spot with investments in three companies each, according to the Practus Hurun India PE Performers 2022 report.
Sequoia Capital India made four investments in Indian companies totalling around $125 million in CY2021. The companies are: Zetwerk, Five Star Business Finance, Desiderata Impact Ventures and Honasa Consumer (Mamaearht). Ravi Shankar GV, managing director of Sequoia Capital India, has been leading operations of the VC in India since 2006 and has partnered with 28 unicorns, including BharatPe, Blackbuck, BYJU’S, CarDekho, Cars24, ChargeBee, and CoinSwitch. In CY2021, Shankar led funding in four companies, including two unicorns – Zetwerk and Mamaearth.
Norwest Venture Partners investment totalled $67 million in CY21. These include Duroflex, Veritas Finance and SK Finance. Norwest is a global, multi-stage investment firm that manages more than $9.5 billion in capital and has funded more than 600 companies since inception.
Tiger Global invested $150 million in four Indian companies in CY2021. These include OfBusiness, Smartpaddle Technology (Bizongo) and Desiderata Impact Ventures (Progcap). The New York-headquartered firm, which invested in 361 deals in 2021 according to PitchBook, is evaluating market conditions and plans to limit the number of new cheques it writes till December.
Honasa Consumer (Mamaearth), founded by the SharkTank host Gazal Alagh, topped the PE performance ranking list with an average growth of 491% over the last year. Mamaeath topped the list among 125 companies in India that received a single round of PE funding of more than $25 million in the calendar year 2021.
Encube Ethicals, an integrated pharmaceutical company dedicated only to topical formulations, is ranked second in this classification reporting a growth of 343%. Ecom Express, a technology-enabled logistics solutions provider, is ranked third with a growth of 283%. In fourth place with a 224% growth comes Desiderata Impact Ventures (Progcap), invested by Tiger Global Management, Sequoia, and Creation Investments Capital Management. Ranked fifth in the list is Acme Formulation, with a 172% growth.
Speaking at the launch of the report, Deepak Narayanan, CEO and founder of Practus, said over the last decade PE and VC investments in Indian companies have seen a significant upsurge and scaled an all-time high of $70 billion in 2021, an increase of 96% over the 2020 deal value, excluding the Reliance Retail and Jio deals.