Irrespective of where you’re in your startup stage, your business needs money. For your teams to be happy, to keep the lights on, and keep the momentum going. It’s important to resort to startup funding in India. There are many stages in startup funding. These stages determine how far you’ve come in your business. Some of them are given below –
- Seed Capital
- Angel Investors Funding
- Venture Capital Financing
- Mezzanine Financing and Bridge Loans
- Initial Public Offering (IPO)
Let’s Look At A Recent Example of Startup Funding in India
Early Stage Investments – Accel Raises $650 Million New Funds
The recent news from Mumbai says that Accel raised $650 million in new funds. It’s an early-stage venture capital organization. Accel has backed the likes of Swiggy, Flipkart, Browserstack, Freshworks. The $650 million 7th fund is to back startup funding across India. The new startup funds come after every 3 years. After it was mopped up by $550 million. Since then, VC firms continued exploring early, pre-seed, seed-stage startups. This being said by a senior executive at Accel. The total commitments of Accel are crossing $2 billion now.
Popular for being the initial Facebook backer, Accel’s corpus is the second largest. As compared to any other startup firm, this Palo Alto-headquartered firm has made its mark. It’s number one to invest in India and Southeast Asia. After this, Sequoia India picked up $1.35 billion in 2020. Isn’t that incredible?
It’s expected to come towards a larger fund of around $2.8 billion. According to Anand Daniel, the partner of Accel India, they will continue to back up firms. Organizations in sectors like global software (Saas), e-commerce, healthcare, and consumer tech. These ventures will be given extra preference for startup funding in India.
Daniel said that its portfolio organizations are valued at more than $100 billion. As per the firm, there are 16 out of 18 firms that are currently valued at more than $1 billion. They are commonly known as Unicorns in the business world. Accel became their first institutional investor. 90% of the corporate funds are deployed in the initial stages.
The growing competition is catching fledgling startups. Accel launched its pre-seed investment program, Atoms. With this, Accel backed the organizations at their idea stage. SeedtoScale is also run by the fund that’s a platform targeted at the seed stage founders. So, you see how famous startup funding in India is becoming. It’s quite popular and it’s going to make way more attractions for the business. It’s a delight to see ventures coming together and helping each other.
Abhinav Chaturvedi who’s a partner at Accel said something interesting. They are currently searching for backing firms in the Web3 segment and crypto. There are many applications that bridge the gap between Web3 and Web2. This will also double down the focus on Crypto. That’s what he has to say about it. Accel’s startup bet in cross-border enterprise SaaS services has really paid off. Especially with Freshworks’ IPO on Nasdaq. But, with the current crash across global and Indian public markets in tech stocks. Many tech startups are delaying their IPO plans.
This was the recent news on startup funding. What are your takes on startup funding? Let’s begin the conversation!