Weekly rundown: Xpressbees, Livspace turn unicorn; Polygon draws mega round

Logistics services provider Xpressbees, kirana commerce platform ElasticRun and home interiors and renovation start-up Livspace have raised new funding rounds at over $1 billion valuation to enter the elite unicorn club of start-ups in India.

Xpressbees bagged a Series F round of $300 million. The Pune-based company more than doubled its valuation to $1 billion from its last round in November 2020 when it raised $110 million at close to $400 million valuation. The current round was led by private equity funds Blackstone Growth, TPG Growth and ChrysCapital. Existing investors, Investcorp and Norwest Venture Partners, also participated in the round. The current round is primarily a secondary transaction, with Beijing-headquartered CDH Investments, one of China's largest investment firms, fully exiting the company, while Elevation Capital (formerly SAIF Partners) and Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba made partial exits.

Another Pune-based start-up ElasticRun secured $300 million of funding led by SoftBank Group, Prosus Ventures and Goldman Sachs. The round valued the company at over $1.5 billion. The company has so far raised over $400 million so far. Its other investors include Kalaari Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Avataar Ventures and Prosus. 
 
Livspace raised $180 million in a funding round led by private equity firm KKR. The Series F round also saw participation from existing investors such as Ingka Group Investments (holding company of IKEA), Jungle Ventures, Venturi Partners, and Peugeot Investments, among others. The company said its valuation more than doubled during the current fundraise to over $1 billion and that the cumulative fundraise by the start-up now stands at $450 million.

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Layer 2 Ethereum scaling solutions start-up Polygon scored the largest venture capital round this week at $450 million. The round was led by the by Sequoia Capital India with participation from more than 40 major venture capital firms, including SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Galaxy Digital, Galaxy Interactive, Tiger Global, Republic Capital and prominent investors like Alan Howard (Brevan Howard co-founder) and Kevin O'Leary (Mr. Wonderful from ABC's Shark Tank). The company said this is the first major financing round since the project's funding in 2017. The funds will be raised through a private sale of Polygon's native MATIC token. Made in India MATIC crypto tokens are listed on global crypto exchanges and are counted amongst the top 15 digital assets globally.

Meanwhile, fintech unicorn Razorpay made its first international acquisition by picking up a majority stake in Curlec, a leading Malaysian firm. The deal valued the company at $19-$20 million. Kuala Lumpur-based Curlec builds solutions for recurring payments for modern businesses of all sizes.

On the venture funds front, venture debt provider Trifecta Capital announced the final close of its maiden equity fund Trifecta Leaders Fund - I at Rs 1,500 crore. The company added a greenshoe of Rs 375 crores to the fund, which it expects to close in a quarter from now. Launched in May 2021, the fund marked its first close in July and has already deployed approximately Rs 730 crore across eight companies such as Dailyhunt, Livspace, Cars24, Pristyn Care, ixigo, the Good Glamm Group, API Holdings (Pharmeasy) and Meesho.

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