ChrysCapital raises $850 million in record 4 months

MUMBAI: ChrysCapital clinched the fastest fund-raising by any India-bred private equity firm, closing its $850-million eighth fund in under four months. The speedy closure suggests that global risk capital providers remain positive on India amid growing macro-economic uncertainties worldwide.

The four partners of the asset manager pumped in about $75 million from their side, taking the overall corpus closer to $925 million. TOI last month reported that ChrysCapital, the country’s oldest private equity manager, was finalising its latest fund at $850 million.

ChrysCapital received commitments topping $2.1 billion, or 2.5 times more than the targeted corpus, but decided not to increase the fund size. The latest fund takes ChrysCapital’s asset under management to over $4 billion — also the largest India-focused private equity investor.

“The fund-raise benefited from our track record of $5.5 billion in realisations through 70-odd exits. All major existing investors continued their commitment to ChrysCapital, leading to a very high re-up rate (the proportion of existing investors — by number or value — who commit to a new fund). The fund, which was significantly oversubscribed within four months of the launch, also saw strong demand from several marquee new investors. We closed the fund in just 100 days, to be precise,” ChrysCapital MD Gaurav Ahuja, who leads fund-raising and investor relations, said.

Former Temasek heavyweight Manish Kejriwal co-founded Kedaara Capital had raised $795 million for its second fund in under eight months in 2017 — one of the fastest fund-raises in Indian private equity business.

Sovereign wealth funds, large public pension funds, university endowments and major insurance companies are among the risk capital providers to private equity business. Several other Indian private equity managers, including True North and Multiples Asset Management, are on the road to raise their latest funds currently.

ChrysCapital managing partner Kunal Shroff said, “The firm will keep the funnel broad from an investment size perspective. We are increasingly being invited to participate in larger investment opportunities and have completed large investments in NSE and Mankind Pharma. We can write equity checks of more than $200 million, and can look at deals as large as $500-600 million co-investments from our global sponsors”.

ChrysCapital had a hectic 2018, which included a return to Mankind Pharma with a $325-million investment along with its sponsors. The deal — in which ChrysCapital trumped global peers Advent and Carlyle — was instrumental in Asian Private Equity and Venture Capital Association naming its partner Sanjiv Kaul as the private equity professional of the year. On the exit side, ChrysCapital sold IT services company LiquidHub to Capgemini for $500 million, besides cashing out of City Union Bank and Torrent Pharma.