PolicyBazaar investor Chiratae closes another fund at $337 million, with three portfolio startups ready to go public

• Chiratae plans to invest in 50 startups with this fund over the next couple of years.
• It will look to make bets in 20 startups annually, working across seed stage to late stage.
• Chiratae is also an investor in PolicyBazaar, which has recently filed preliminary papers to go public.
• Its portfolio includes 100 companies such as Lenskart, Firstcry and Cure.fit.

Investment firm Chiratae Ventures has announced the final close of its fourth fund at $337 million on Friday, August 6. The Mumbai-based venture capital (VC) firm will use this capital to invest in about 50 companies over the next couple of years.

It plans to close about 15-20 deals on an annual basis, Chiratae Ventures’s executive director and partner Karthik Prabhakar told Business Insider. These investments would range from early-stage to later stage rounds.


Though the closure of Chiratae’s Fund IV was delayed by over 10 months due to COVID-19, it was oversubscribed by 25%.

The fund is backed by marquee investors such as World Bank’s investment arm International Finance Corporation (IFC), Infosys’ Kris Gopalakrishnan, Asian Paints FO, Unilever, ITC, Premji Invest, Nippon, and others.

Chiratae Ventures (formerly known as IDG Ventures India) was founded by Sudhir Sethi and TC Meenakshisundaram in 2006. The investment firm — which has $950 million as assets under management (AUM) — has invested in more than 100 companies in India.

*Unicorns are companies valued at or above $1 billion.
**Soonicorns are companies are going become unicorn soon

Its portfolio companies include Yatra and Newgen, which went public in 2016 and 2018 respectively. The company currently has three initial public offering (IPO)-bound companies in its portfolio. This includes online insurance aggregator PolicyBazaar, which recently filed its preliminary papers with market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) to go public.

Although the investment firm claims to have two more publicly-listed companies in making over the next three years, it has refused to share any more details about them.

Chiratae has big plans with startups going public

The Indian startup ecosystem was busy churning out unicorns in the summer of 2021, but the monsoons are all about IPOs. Over the last months, several companies like Nykaa, Mobikwik, Paytm, Fino Payments Bank, and CarTrade have filed their papers for IPO. Meanwhile, Zomato and EasyMyTrip have already listed publicly.

The way things are going, Chiratae expects to have more IPO-bound or listed companies in its portfolio. The investment firm has not pitched to sell any of its shareholdings in PolicyBazaar, the fintech startups’s draft red herring prospectus (DRHP) has revealed.

Talking to Business Insider, Chiratae Ventures’ founder and chairperson Sudhir Sethi said, “We've exited 35 or 38 companies. Some have died, so the active portfolio is around 60. We invest in 15 every year. Will there be some who will become unicorns? Will there be some who won't last out longer? The answers are very big yes. The three numbers going to ten, don’t be surprised because scaling is happening.”

Meanwhile, Meenakshisundaram added that IPOs are going to be a big trend as companies in the last decade have grown to scale. There have been a lot of exits — both in secondary market or in IPO — which has given the investors the confidence to come into this asset class, he added.

Meanwhile, Sethi added that decade old companies are going public now and the cycle will continue forward. “I think the world of unicorns is a given, right? It's the world of decacorns, which is now being thought of,” he added.

“Compared to yesterday, today, obviously, is a lot more exciting, and the best time to be an entrepreneur and a VC,” Prabhakar added.

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