With $1.85 billion, Bessemer is back on the big-deal hunt

BENGALURU: Silicon Valley-headquartered venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners is looking at making early to mid-stage bets across areas like online marketplaces, financial technology, healthcare technology and software after closing a new global fund of $1.85 billion. The new fund was announced last month, which is the firm’s tenth vehicle and slightly larger than its previous fund of $1.6 billion raised in 2015.

“While we don’t have a country specific allocation, Bessemer has invested 30% of the corpus in international markets which is India and Israel for us. This allocation will roughly remain the same,” said managing director Vishal Gupta, who heads the India office of the firm based in Bengaluru.

The VC firm, known as an early backer of Linkedin, Pinterest and Shopify, is close to finalising a Series-A investment in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) space. The venture capital firm, which has been active in India for over a decade, has over two dozen portfolio companies in India.

Some of its prominent investments in India include food delivery platform Swiggy, Alibaba-backed online grocer Bigbasket, holidays marketplace Travel Triangle, online pharmacy Pharmeasy and local services marketplace UrbanClap.

Last year, Bessemer had completed three deals in payment processing platform Innoviti, healthcare application DocsApp and Perfios, which offers an analytics tech platform to more than 100 banks.

This year the firm has been going slower, according to Gupta. “Dealflow has been very good. The valuations have been a challenge. Secondly, I would say, finding large categories in the consumer internet space has not been very apparent. But we are seeing a tonne of opportunities in fintech, health tech and software,” said Gupta.