Cross-Border VC Nexus Venture Partners Is Raising $450 Million For Fifth Fund

In venture investing, it can sometimes pay to straddle the globe.

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Cross-border venture firms seek competitive advantage by building strong connections in two (or, rarely, sometimes more) countries and building bridges between them. In theory, this gives their portfolio companies easier access to international markets, a quicker path to growth, and a wider array of exit options.

One such cross-border fund is Nexus Venture Partners, which has two offices in India— Bengaluru and Mumbai—and an American outpost on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley. And, as with all venture firms, it needs to raise fresh LP capital from time to time.

In a filing posted to the SEC’s website this morning, the firm disclosed it’s raising a fifth fund, a $450 million pool of capital legally domiciled in Mauritius. The filing indicates that the firm has already raised $313 million for the fund so far. If Nexus Venture Partners manages to raise the remaining $137 million for the fund, Fund V would be the same size as the firm’s fourth flagship fund.

The chart below shows the size of the firm’s flagship funds.

Excluding special purpose vehicles, sidecar funds, and growth funds, Nexus Venture Partners will have raised $1.49 billion across its five flagship funds once it closes out Fund V.

As mentioned earlier, Nexus Venture Partners invests primarily in American and Indian startups. The chart below, based on company data in Crunchbase, shows the geographic distribution of the cross-border firm’s portfolio companies.

A majority of the firm’s investment deals are struck with companies based in the United States, according to Crunchbase data.

The firm has seen a number of exits in its portfolio. These include predictive analytics provider Infer (sold to ESW Capital), application deployment platform ElasticBox (sold to CenturyLink), and Indian on-demand logistics provider GoPigeon (acquired by U.S.-based Narvar), among others.

Although Nexus Venture Partners’ fifth fund is not the largest Crunchbase News has covered recently, it shows continued LP interest in the cross-border strategy and could speak to ongoing confidence in the Indian startup ecosystem.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias