Indian VC Firm Lightbox Ventures Targets $200M For Third Fund, According To Filings

Lightbox Ventures (also known simply as Lightbox) is in the midst of raising a new fund.

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On Monday morning, the Mumbai-based venture capital firm filed paperwork with the SEC revealing that it’s almost done raising capital for “Lightbox Ventures III.” The filings indicate that Lightbox has raised roughly $178 million out of a targeted $200 million for its third flagship venture fund. So far, nineteen limited partners have invested in the fund, which officially began accepting investment on September 3.

At $200 million, it would be the largest such venture fund raised by Lightbox to date. If successfully closed, Fund III would bring Lightbox’s total funds raised to approximately $392.2 million to date.1

Here’s the rundown of its prior fundraising activities:

• Lightbox’s first fund was $38.2 million, according to its original Form D filing. A TechCrunch profile of Lightbox says its first fund acquired equity stakes in six companies: GreenDust, ZoomIn, MapmyIndia, Paymate, FutureBazaar, and Kotak Urja.
• Its second fund, launched shortly after raising the first, topped out at $100 million, according to its original filing. Financial advisory disclosures, last updated in June 2018, indicate that the gross asset value of Fund II is just under $160 million.
• Lightbox raised a $54 million “Expansion” fund in late 2016.

Lightbox is not the only Indian VC firm to raise fresh capital recently. In late August, Crunchbase News reported that Sequoia Capital closed $695 million for its sixth India-focused fund. Also in August, Matrix Partners India announced it raised $300 million for its third fund. Lightspeed Venture Partners announced its India offshoot fetched $175 million for its second fund in July. And in May, Crunchbase News broke the story that Nexus Venture Partners was in the thick of raising $450 million for its cross-border strategy.

The firm is led by Sandeep Murthy, a former general partner at Sherpalo Ventures, who started Lightbox after his old firm shifted its investment focus to the United States. Sid Talwar, Prashant Mehta, Jeremy Wenokur, and Sunny Rao joined the firm as its original partners. Rao left the partnership in 2016, but Murthy and the other three partners remain.

At time of writing, Crunchbase data indicates that Lightbox hasn’t made a publicly-disclosed investment so far this year. But that may yet change in the remaining months of 2018.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias