Avendus, the major investment lender for enterprise discounts in India, confirmed on Wednesday it is looking to increase up to $350 million for its new private fairness fund. 

The new fund, called Long run Leaders Fund III, will permit the Mumbai-headquartered business to create more substantial checks and maintain a significant posture in the startups it backs, stated its controlling lover Ritesh Chandra in an interview with TechCrunch. TechCrunch noted in early April that Avendus was putting together a program to increase a new fund.

Avendus has proven alone as the most significant venture advisor for startups in India, a frequent fixture in most progress-phase deals in the region. It supplied providers in around 30 promotions last calendar year, such as merger and acquisition transactions, in accordance to Venture Intelligence, a private industry perception platform. The increasing dimensions of its non-public equity unit underscores the firm’s ambitions to get its tentacles entrenched even extra deeply into the ecosystem and have extra upsides on the winnings.

The firm’s increase to prominence was aided by the point that quite a few of its perfectly-proven worldwide rivals, such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JP Morgan, to begin with paid out considerably less focus to the Indian current market, making it possible for Avendus to attain a foothold and develop associations with the country’s burgeoning tech business people. 

That romantic relationship is also encouraging the firm’s non-public fairness device to achieve entry to some of the higher-profile deals. Economic services startups Juspay and Zeta have mainly authorized only Avendus exterior of guide backer SoftBank on their cap tables, for occasion. “These are firms that arrived out of our interactions and networks,” explained Chandra. 

Avendus’ non-public equity unit, whose portfolio consists of Delhivery, Lenskart, Licious, VerSe Innovation, Xpressbees, and the Nationwide Stock Exchange, has also attained a popularity for providing substantial exits to its backers well timed. LensKart and the Nationwide Inventory Exchange, for occasion, both shipped four instances the revenue Avendus invested in in 4 years of investments.

“Our fund’s lifecycle is five to six yrs. A difficulty with the Indian startup ecosystem is that traders have poured a good deal of funds but really don’t see much returns for a very long time period of time. We are focused on how do we get our revenue again,” he mentioned.

Even with the developing pattern of tech startups in India heading general public, a phenomenon that was unheard of just four decades back, traders are not able to entirely count on IPOs for returns. In accordance to Chandra, Avendus has proven interactions that help the company to exit its positions by promoting stakes to late-phase investors, these types of as sovereign buyers, offering an different avenue for producing returns aside from IPOs.