New Delhi, Dec. 4 -- Nexus Venture Partners, a venture capital firm that invests in early- and growth-stage startups in India and the US, has closed its eight fund at $700 million (Rs 6,290 crore), keeping the size unchanged from the previous vehicle in dollar terms.
The closing of the latest fund comes less than three years after the firm wrapped up its seventh fund in February 2023, also at $700 million, or around Rs 5,750 crore at the time. With this, Nexus' assets under management now stand at about $3.2 billion. VCCircle had reported in 2023 that the firm's AUM had crossed the $2 billion mark after the close of its seventh fund.
With the eighth fund, Nexus plans to back early-stage startups building in AI, enterprise software, consumer tech and fintech, it said in a statement on Thursday. The investments will focus on inception, seed, and Series A stages.
"Over the years, we have had the pleasure of backing several founders from the early days of their journeys, who have gone on to take their companies public or are poised to do so soon. With Fund VIII, we're doubling down on visionary entrepreneurs solving the hardest problems and shaping the next wave of global innovation," the firm's partners said in a statement.
Headquartered in Menlo Park, California, the firm has offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru. It takes an integrated approach and invests in early-stage startups in both India and the US from the same fund.
Since February 2023, when it announced the close of its last vehicle, Nexus has invested in blue-collar staffing platform Smartstaff, on-premise LLMs provider GigaM, B2B SaaS platform Rocketlane, quick-service app Snabbit, regulatory compliance startup Zango, and doubled down on its investment in quick commerce platform Zepto, AI-infra startup Neysa, financial-data infrastructure company Daloopa, and mobility platform Rapido.
The VC firm did not immediately respond to VCCircle's queries regarding its past investments or the latest fund.
"The last few years have been surreal for the technology world with trailblazing breakthroughs in generative AI and an unprecedented pace of AI adoption across consumers and businesses alike," the partners added. "From infrastructure to applications, every layer of the tech stack is getting rewritten by AI. Agentic AI is transforming how work gets done, bringing a whole new wave of augmentation and automation across industries."
Founded in 2006 by Naren Gupta, Suvir Sujan and Sandeep Singhal, Nexus had raised about $100 million for its first fund. Its second fund had a corpus of about $220 million, followed by $270 million for its third fund in 2012.
In 2015, the investor became the first home-grown venture capital firm to cross $1 billion in assets under management. That same year, it raised $450 million for its fourth fund, its largest at the time.
Nexus later floated its fifth fund to raise $450 million and received commitments of about $350 million by May 2019.
It went on to plan a sixth fund two years later, aiming the same size as its two previous vehicles, though the status of this fund remains unclear and Nexus is understood to have not moved ahead with it.
Co-founder Naren Gupta passed away in December 2021, while fellow co-founder and managing partner Sandeep Singhal stepped down from the firm earlier that year.
Nexus today has five managing directors, including Sujan. Other leaders on the investment team include Abhishek Sharma, Anup Gupta, Jishnu Bhattacharjee and Sameer Brij Verma.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from VC Circle.