Peak XV raises $1.3bn with focus on Indian startups

Mumbai: Nearly three years after splitting from its Silicon Valley parent Sequoia Capital, Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia) has raised $1.3 billion for a clutch of funds to bet on startup founders building in India and the Asia-Pacific region.

The capital will be deployed across three funds-India seed, India venture which will largely cover early stage startups and Apac. The cheque amount for seed or very early-stage funding will be in the range of up to $5 million, while India venture fund will make investments in the range of $5-15 million, in cases going up to $20 million. The fresh capital sits alongside large portions of uninvested funds from its $1-billion growth fund raised in 2022, giving the company room to invest in startups across scale and sizes.

"We have an existing growth fund that is about half uninvested. We are continuing to invest from that fund wherein we can fund up to $75-100 million at the top end," Shailendra Singh, MD at Peak XV Partners told TOI in an interview on Friday, even as he added that for growth investing, India still is one of the world's most expensive markets.

"What is happening in tech globally is that the dollars are concentrating into fewer and fewer companies and those very few companies are becoming enormous in scale. The phenomenon is also playing out in startups that are becoming big. In growth equity, we have to find the very few companies that will become very big and I think that's one way in which tech investing is changing quite a bit," Singh said.