Prosus Ventures' (formerly Naspers) head of investments and M&A in India, Ashutosh Sharma, said that Prosus has invested $8-9 billion in India over the past six years.
While there are no soft or hard investment allocations for India, Sharma expects the old investment trend to continue. In this year alone, Prosus has already made four equity investments.
Prosus Ventures' India portfolio includes companies like Swiggy, Meesho, Pharmeasy, Byju's, Eruditus, and Urban Company among others. Sharma noted that Prosus invests out of its balance sheet and hence has the flexibility to do cheque sizes ranging from $5 million to even $650 million.
Focus on SaaS firms
Started as a consumer internet investor, Prosus is now also focusing on SaaS companies. Talking about the fund's growing interest in enterprise tech, Sharma said Prosus has been late in entering this space. "We only have three SaaS investments at this time. All three of them are early stage and were done within the last six months, before that we had nothing. It is dawning on us that SaaS built in India for the world is a big thesis item. Not just in SaaS but generally in B2B as well. The depths of Indian talent is very clear and the quality of ideas have improved a lot even within SaaS. Therefore it excites us a lot," he added.
Amid the ongoing market downturn, Prosus said it has maintained the same investment pace. Many start-ups including Prosus' portfolio companies have laid off employees and shut down verticals in an attempt to survive the funding winter.
One such start-up is the edtech decacorn, Byju's, which has laid off hundreds of employees this year and also reported a 20x jump in FY21 losses. Further, the edtech company has been under public and government scrutiny for an 18-month delay in filing its financials.
On Byju’s situation
Commenting on Byju's 18 month delay, Sharma said, he was concerned about the situation but had a lot of confidence in Byju's and its management team. "I was thinking of how we can get done with this and get back to business. I think that was my biggest concern because we had to focus a lot on those (audit) things," Sharma added. Byju's had attributed the changes in its revenue recognition as one of the reasons for the delay.
Another Prosus portfolio company and healthcare major, Pharmeasy, is reportedly raising a new funding round at a lower valuation after putting its IPO plans on hold due to market volatility.
Responding to this, Sharma said, "Pharmeasy is in a tricky situation because of the delayed IPO. By the time we got approval for the IPO, it was already too late. The market had softened. The plan was to raise some money in the IPO. Unfortunately that did not happen and so Pharmeasy now has to raise a new funding round. Prosus has already committed to investing in that new round."