Venture Capital firm Matrix Venture has raised $110 million as part of its second fund from its existing network of investors. The venture firm will now have a total corpus of about $400 million in its second fund, which was first set up in 2011 to invest in Fintech, eCommerce, B2B, Logistics and SaaS startups.
To further boost the corpus of its second fund, the firm will raise another round in the second half of 2017. With the newly raised fund, Matrix aims to invest across seed and Series-A deals in later-stage companies.
Matrix typically makes 10 investments a year and in 2016 there would be more debt-centered Series A investments. "It may close around 6 Series A deals, one or two Series B and 8-10 seed deals," said Avnish Bajaj, Co-founder and managing director of Matrix Partners.
Apart from fund raise, its Co-founder Rishi Navani has quit the firm, which will now be managed by Co-founder Avnish Bajaj along with managing directors Vikram Vaidyanathan and Tarun Davda. Bajaj is a Harvard Business School alumnus who Co-founded one of India’s earliest eCommerce ventures — Baazee. Com and sold to eBay in 2004 for $55 million, set up Matrix Partners in 2006 along with Navani.
After leaving the venture, Navani will continue to work with several portfolio companies of Matrix Partners and he is also planning to set up a new investment firm, which will focus on growth-stage investment in tech companies and, also invest in the public markets, as per people familiar with the development.
Recently, Matrix Partners India has invested in companies like location-based mobile application BuddyBB, fin-tech startup Finomena and in an online marketplace for business to business commerce, OfBusiness. Its portfolio also includes taxi-hailing company Ola (ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd) and online classifieds firm Quikr India Pvt. Ltd which are valued at around $5 billion and $1 billion, respectively.
