India Deals: Flipkart Rehiring Old-Hands & DSG Consumer Partners' New Fund of $40M & More

Here are a few deals which happened in the Indian startup ecosystem; Checkout the brief description about all of them:

1) Flipkart Rehiring Old-Hands:
E-commerce company Flipkart, which has seen continuous churn out the top level for the last few quarters, is now working to revamp its senior leadership team by bringing back old hands. It seems rehiring was a part of a very-well thought out plan.

Former employees coincides with the return of former interim CFO Kalyan Krishnamurthy, who is leading efforts to put the company back on track. Among those who have come back over the past year are Lokesh Rajpal, who returned in August 2016, after a brief stint outside, to handle key functions at the legal department, and Nishit Garg, who had moved to Flipkart’s main investor Tiger Global nearly two years ago. Garg, who has recently joined back, is Kalyan’s chief of staff at Flipkart—the duo worked together at Tiger and, prior to that, at Flipkart. Similarly, Nitin Rajput, who joined Flipkart after it acquired his venture, Bollywood content company Chakpak, is back after working on his own startups for a little over two years. Also, earlier this month, Manish Kumar returned to the company as vice president, business development after a year-and-a-half. Sameer Nigam and Rahul Chari have the unique distinction of being acqui-hired by Flipkart twice. The duo had first joined Flipkart when the e-commerce major acquired their startup Mime360 in 2011. Nigam and Chari worked with Flipkart for four years before leaving in 2015 to build payment solution PhonePe. They returned to the Flipkart fold when it acquired PhonePe in April last year.

2) DSG Consumer Partners Closes New Fund at $40 M
Deepak Shahdadpuri-led early-stage investment firm DSG Consumer Partners has achieved the final close of its second fund at $40M according to a few media reports. The second fund, DSGCP II, aims to make 20 investments, citing Shahdadpuri. It will focus on companies in India and Southeast Asia, and will deploy the entire corpus by mid-2018. The first fund was launched in January 2016 and had hit the first close at $35 million in a little over eight weeks. The second fund has already made investments in nine companies, including Raw Pressery and Drums Food International.

3) Live learning platform NeoStencil raises $1M in investment
Ed-tech startup NeoStencil, founded in December 2014, has raised $1 M in a funding round led by media house Times Group’s ad-for-equity investment arm Brand Capital and California-based Paragon Trust. 91Springboard, M&S Partners Pvt. Ltd founder Hirokazu Mashita and Jabong co-founder Praveen Sinha also took part in this round, NeoStencil co-founder and COO Kush Beejal told.

4) IL&FS forms $550M distressed assets investment platform with Lone Star Funds:
Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services Ltd (IL&FS) has formed a joint investment platform with American private equity fund house Lone Star for stressed infrastructure projects in India.

The platform would have a capital pool of $550M, which could result in asset purchases of up to $2.5B. IL& FS is one of India’s leading infrastructure financing and developmental Institutions. Since its incorporation in 1987, IL& FS has built a strong portfolio of infrastructure projects aggregating to$25B. Funds formed by principals under the Lone Star Funds umbrella have raised aggregate capital commitments exceeding $70 B. Lone Star has experience in both the public and private investment sectors, having closed more than 1,350 transactions with an aggregate purchase price of $180B (including acquisition financing and co-investors), according to its website.