11 Top Early Funding Investors in South Asia’s Industrial Field

Intro

The Industrial field deals primarily with the production of supplies, equipment, and machinery that are utilized for manufacturing rather than sold directly to customers. Professionals in the industry usually work in manufacturing, mining, chemical engineering; some other popular sectors include animal husbandry and geospatial services. To ensure the industry is profitable and develops rather quickly, one can refer to a 5-year CAGR in revenues for some of its branches: Machinery, for instance, has a growth rate of 3.44%, while Metals & Mining expand at 4.02%.

VCs and corporate investors in South Asia have also been expressing interest in the Industrial field over the last 4 years. Twelve of them, featured in this article, invested at the early stage and are actively contributing to the mentioned sphere. The diagram presents those companies in accordance to the sums of money they provided for early funding. Noticeably, $361.1M of early funding, collected over the mentioned time, accounts for almost a third (26.6%) of the total amount of capital raised in South Asia in 4 years.

11 Top Early Funding Investors in South Asia’s Industrial Field
data provided by Unicorn Nest

Key takeaways

• Funds Geography – All the listed VCs are based in the same country, India. The city of Bangalore hosts 4 funds; the rest are located in different cities across the country, including Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Gurgaon. Most frequently, the financing from the sampled companies is collected by Indian projects, but they also consider startups from the United States and the United Kingdom for investment. For the majority of the firms, the country of the fund’s and the project’s origin coincide.
• Industry Focus – Commonly, the funds invest in the Finance field. However, they also pay attention to Industrial, Social, and Medical Service spheres.
• Important Years – While 1983 was the year of establishment for the oldest fund, called Accel India, the most recent one, Edge Ventures, started functioning in 2018. In 2000 the most amount of funds were founded. From 2007 to 2020, the companies were the most active in terms of closed deals, with 2020 being especially productive for some of them.
• Investments – VCs tend to take part in 2 rounds yearly with the same frequency as in 2-6. The most active fund, Spark Capital, participated 425 times; the minimum of funding rounds, 11, is possessed by Edge Ventures. As for the lead investments, the respective highest and lowest values are 122 and 1. The average values for the two mentioned types of investments are 103.7 and 42.0, while the medians are 84.0 and 32.5. Most commonly, the VCs on the list participate 68 times. The index of difference between lead investments and the average ones falls between -32.76 and 19.91 for different firms from the sample. This difference’s average value in percentage points is -13.96, and the median is -19.14. Therefore, some funds lead the financing less often than others, as in the case with Edge Ventures and Spark Capital.
• Typical Rounds – In some cases, the funds present 3-4 partakers per round; usually, they have 2-3 investors participating. The majority of the startups receive less than 100 thousand dollars at a time. For some, the round size climbs up, reaching 50-100 million. Among the funds’ multiplicators for portfolio companies at the last known valuation, the highest one reaches 3.04. On average, the multiplier equals 0.44; its median is 0.07. The mode of the multiplicators is 0.0.

Overall, the top 11 early investors in the South Asian Industrial field are coming from Indian cities, such as Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Gurgaon. The most massive support is offered to Finance projects, with Industrial, Social, and Medical Service sectors following. Each of the 2-6 rounds per year, held by the listed firms, issues a size of less than 100 000 or 50-100 million US dollars.