Vani Kola-led Kalaari Capital has returned more than $100 million in exits in the current calendar year. This comes at a time when the backer of unicorn companies like Elastic Run, Dream11 and Upstox, among others, has pumped in around $25 million in more than 10 companies this calendar year, Kola said in an interview with Mint.
Some of the firm’s notable investments this year are Clean Electric, Lxme, Kindlife, Figr and Convin among others. “On an average, some of our funds have given over 4x DPI already and will probably generate 5-6x in return to investors. Obviously, those have to be slightly older funds. The newer the fund, that number is yet to be validated. But because we have been in the market for 15-plus years, we have at least three funds where we can demonstrate that kind of actual return of capital to investors, which becomes the confidence cycle,” Kola said. DPI. or distributed to paid-in capital, is a financial metric that measures how well a venture capital (VC) fund is performing.
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Kalaari Capital raised its fourth fund of around $210 million in 2021 and is currently investing from this. The firm has already invested around 60% of the fund and will look at raising a new fund later next year after having finished investing almost 80% of the corpus, according to Kola.
Pipeline for 2025
Talking about the pipeline of investments in 2025, Kola said that the firm is meeting several companies that are looking to build a better consumer brand to service unserved populations or the Bharat model. “There is a whole consumer products play that I think will continue to see significant rise in companies and ideas. I think there is a whole commerce adoption, commerce enablement model that will continue to see India innovate and fast forward like whether it’s the social commerce, quick commerce, I think we’ll see other models emerge as well for different segments of the market opportunity,” she said. Saas (software-as-a-service) models from India will be adopted around the world in many sectors, Kola added.
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For Kola, who has been in the venture investing business for almost two decades now, categorizing companies in sectors doesn’t help. “See, we have a notion of a sector, and sometimes that is a trapping. We can have a notion of what are the sunrise technologies, but once a technology is that pervasive, it’s like saying what sectors will computers influence? All sectors, right? What sectors will SaaS influence? The answer is in all sectors, right? So, I think where we are is on fundamental technology shifts,” she said.
Kola feels the next decade is going to be dominated by tech-led businesses in what her firm calls the ‘Techade’ of opportunity.
Also, the firm is betting big on backing women-led founders. For an industry where 16% of the funded capital is going into companies that have female co-founders, firms like Kalaari are looking to change the narrative and increase it by creating awareness and ensuring more women-led businesses find funding.
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