India focused Chinese venture capital fund Ganesh Ventures has decided to make an aggressive foray into Indian startup ecosystem. Ganesh Ventures is backed by eWTP Ecosystem Fund and also Lion Capital.
Ganesh Ventures, which has a total funding corpus of $250 million, was founded by leading Chinese woman entrepreneur Jessica Wong. Apart from eWTP and Lion Capital, several individual investors from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Europe and Taiwan have also contributed to the corpus.
Wong has a rich experience of Indian startup ecosystem as she was the former co-founder of Hong Kong based investment firm Cyber Carrier, which has invested in several Indian startups. Cyber Carrier recently hit the headlines after it made a profitable partial exit from KrazyBee, a lending platform dedicated to students.
Commenting about her investment experience in Indian startups, Wong said “After years of exploring and analyzing India market, we can say with confidence that our investment and post-investment management strategy has worked very well.”
According to reports, Ganesh Ventures will aim to invest its entire corpus in Indian startups in next 3 to 5 years. The main focus of the funds will be on startups hailing from diverse sectors like media, finance, health and cosumer products. Reports further claim that Ganesh Ventures is planning to open office in Gurgaon and Bengaluru.
China’s growing love affair with Indian startups
India and China’s diplomatic relationship may have nosedived during last few years, but this has had minimal impact on latter’s increasing investment in the Indian startup ecosystem. Two of China’s biggest internet giant, Alibaba and Tencent, have spearheaded many funding rounds of worth millions of dollars in several startups during last 2-3 years.
Alibaba owns majority stake in India’s largest digital wallet company Paytm and also owns stake several other high profile startups like BigBasket, Xpressbees and Zomato. Tencent, on other hand, has invested in well-known startups like Ola, Ganna.com, Byju and MakeMyTrip.
After Alibaba and Tencent, another Chinese conglomerate Fosun International recently announced that it will soon start investing in early stage Indian startups.