'Tripling down on our India strategy,' says Jungle Ventures' Amit Anand

Singapore-based venture capital firm Jungle Ventures is scaling up its investment in India. It plans to double down on areas such as software-as-a-service, consumer tech, edtech, and healthcare.

This includes partnering with founders to build high-growth, capital-efficient technology businesses, and supporting their growth from seed to unicorn, and IPO stage.

“We have deployed Rs 1,000 crore in India in the last 10 years. We're now hitting a pace of Rs 1,000 crore in a year in India (in largely series B rounds),” said Amit Anand, founding Partner, Jungle Ventures, in a video interview with Business Standard. “That is an inflection point for us. We are tripling down on our India strategy. India has become the largest single market for Jungle, more than 50 per cent larger than any other markets that we're investing in,” he added.

Jungle’s portfolio includes regional and global category leaders like Kredivo, Moglix, Livspace, Builder.ai and Atomberg. Some of them are already unicorns or are on the path to cross $1 billion in valuation.

Anand said that many of these companies are not just Indian tech firms which went global but also consumer companies solving consumers' problems globally. In March, Jungle Ventures led a $27 million series C funding round in Gurugram-based direct-to-consumer brand The Ayurveda Experience (TAE), a company focusing on Ayurvedic products. Founded by Rishabh Chopra in 2010, TAE is the largest direct-to-consumer (D2C) Ayurveda content and products company in North America, Europe, Canada, Australia, and India.

Jungle has also backed Walko Food, India’s fastest-growing ice cream brand and leading quick-service restaurant (QSR) company. It recently further invested $20 million in the firm as growth funding. Walko is tapping into a multi-billion-dollar opportunity in the Indian ice cream industry. Another portfolio firm Moglix, a business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce unicorn for manufacturing goods, is reportedly planning to launch an initial public offering (IPO) within two years. Founded in 2015 by IIT Kanpur alumnus Rahul Garg, Moglix now serves over 500,000 SMEs (small and medium enterprises) and over 100 large enterprises across India and the UAE.

Last year, Builder.ai, an artificial intelligence-powered composable software firm, raised an investment of $250 million in Series D. It was led by Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) and included participation from existing and new investors such as Iconiq Capital, Jungle Ventures & Insight Partners. Established in 2016, the Sachin Dev Duggal-led company provides an AI-powered composable software platform that allows anyone with an idea to build an app (web or mobile) faster and more affordable. The firm started in India. It has extended its UK HQ footprint with four new offices opened since 2021, including the US, the UAE, Singapore, and France.

“We want to help and invest in companies, where they don't just become the dominant player in India, but across the world,” said Anand.

Jungle Ventures was set up in 2012 by Amit Anand and Anurag Srivastava, launching with a $10 million debut fund. It now has $1 billion of assets under management (AUM) and its combined portfolio value is over $12.5 billion.

At a time when startups are witnessing a funding winter, Anand is expecting to witness a resurgence in funding inflows this year. “India and Southeast Asia are back on the track of that steady clip of growth and new dollars are being put on the ground,” said Anand. “There's tremendous value creation happening here.”

He said this is unlike the scenario in 2021 when many startups were overvalued and there was easy access to funding, the ‘fly-by-night tourist investors’ and cross-over funds have gone away. But now there is better value for long-term investors.

Anand said that there is already a lot of capital available for seed and Series A stages. However, companies then struggle to raise Series B. They end up talking to a lot of investors who want to write smaller cheques but cannot understand the venture stage of the business. They may even reach out to crossover funds which, according to Anand have no loyalty to the market. It is this problem that Jungle Ventures aims to solve. “We think Series B has been a perfect space for Jungle to complement the local ecosystem,” said Anand.