Top 9 South-Asian Investors of Artificial Intelligence Industry in Late Funding Rounds

Intro

As modern technologies advance with immense pace, Artificial Intelligence has become one of the most important spheres that wake up the interest of both researchers and investors. It is a wide discipline that requires research and creation of computerized systems, which have a performance similar to the behaviour of human intelligence. The leading spheres in AI include facial, speech and image recognition, machine learning, and natural language processing, as well as computer vision, visual search, and internet of things. Investors are actively involved in the development of the AI industry, thus they are highly interested in investing into it. The amount of money raised in the Artificial Intelligence funding rounds by South-Asian funds reaches  $1.1B, which makes up 4.8% of the total amount raised in Late rounds in South Asia over the last 3 years. The following article depicts the main information about the top 9 investors according to the total money raised in the funding rounds.

Top 9 South-Asian Investors of Artificial Intelligence Industry in Late Funding Rounds
data provided by Unicorn Nest

Key takeaways

• Funds Geography – All the VCs share the same home country – India. The city of Bangalore holds a record of having the largest number of investors – already 3 funds, while New Delhi, Mumbai and Hyderabad are trying to keep up with that pace. The mentioned funds most commonly invest in Indian and the United States startups, heading more resources into the Indian ones. This fact is explained by the coincidence of location of the funds and their most frequent investments.
• Industry Focus – The funds’ main investments come to the Enterprise Software, Gamification and E-Commerce Platforms, however the main target of VCs is the sphere of Finances.
• Important Years – 1999 was the year that gave birth to the oldest fund in the sample, while the youngest one came to this world only in 2016. The 2000 year saw the most funds being founded, and all of them were at the peak of making deals in the period from 2007 to 2020. Nevertheless, the most fruitful year was 2018.
• Investments – 2 funding rounds per year is the mode of the sampled VCs, although they take part in 13 – 24 rounds from time to time. The highest number of rounds taken reaches 280, and the lowest is 19. The average index of funding rounds appears to be 104.8, meanwhile the median is considerably lower: 50.0. Considering the number of lead investments, it varies from 9 to 122, with its average being 42.1 and the median 22.0, and most of the time VCs hold 10 lead investments. The index of difference of lead investments, calculated in percentage points, varies from -28.26 to 2.81. Taking that into account, the average value comes to be -12.59, while the median is -13.14. Based on that statistics, it can be approved that the sampled funds fall behind in acting like lead investors with respect to other funds.
• Typical Rounds – It is common for the VCs to participate in rounds with 3 or 4 investors, while being followed by the tendention of 2-3 investors taking part. The most widespread round size varies in the range from 10 to 50 million, as far as the rarest one is less than 100 thousands. Speaking about the multiplicator for portfolio companies, it averages at 0.53 and has a median of 0.29, with the 0.0 and 2.0 being the lowest and the highest values, respectively.