Early-stage investor Lightspeed Venture Partners, will focus more on growth deals and has put in place a dedicated team to scout for such opportunities, senior executives at the venture capital fund said. Lightspeed has scaled its capital base to tap a larger set of companies, the fund said.

“At the early stage, it is somewhat inevitable that we will miss investing in compelling founders and companies, either because we didn't see those opportunities at the seed or Series A stage, or because we failed to appreciate them fully. By scaling our capital base, we are able to invest in some of these exceptional companies and founders slightly later in their lifecycle,” Bejul Somaia, partner, Lightspeed, said.

“This isn't new for the firm globally or in India. What is new is that we've formalized and expanded the effort and now have a dedicated team that is executing against this strategy,” he added.

“We are going to grow our team size this year and expect to have a full-fledged team of eight people focused on India and Southeast Asia by the end of the year,” said Aditya Sharma, partner and head-growth investments in India, at Lightspeed, who joined the firm in May last year after a 12-year stint at global private equity firm TA Associates.

“We have the early growth funds that target $30-$75 million in cheque sizes while our late-stage growth funds target between $75-$200 million investments. In 2021, we invested over $300 million from the growth platform in India where the smallest cheque was in the $25 million range and the largest was a little north of $100 million,” Sharma said.

“Some growth-stage investments were into net new companies that we would have missed investing in early on, while some are our own venture backed businesses where they've evolved to a certain phase in their journey and we want to keep supporting them as they raise larger funding rounds,” Sharma added.