OYO, Paytm, Sequoia, Accel top deal makers of 2019; startup funding jumps this much from last year

Hospitality company OYO led the deal value table with 1.5 billion dollar funding round raised from SoftBank.

2019 was another good year for startups with respect to the amount of funding raised. Total 887 startups in 2019 got funded with the total amount hitting $14.5-billion mark — around 26 per cent jump from last year, according to the data shared by Tracxn. The investment in 2017 stood at nearly $15 billion and around $11.5 billion in 2018. However, the number of funding rounds witnessed slowdown of around 15 per cent from the previous year. From around 1,550 rounds in 2017, the figure went south to around 1,400 in 2018 and further to 1,185 rounds in 2019.

Hospitality company OYO led the deal value table with $1.5 billion funding round raised from SoftBank, Sequoia others, followed by Paytm’s $1 billion Series G round, $585 million Series D round of Udaan, $413 million Series F round of logistics firm Delhivery, Ola’s Series J round of $300 million, $250 million raised by Ola for its electric vehicle arm — Ola Electric Mobility and $220 million Series D funding of digital pharmacy PharmEasy.

The top five venture capital investors of the year were Sequoia with around 58 deals followed by Accel that made around 45 investments, Tiger Global with approximately 25 investments, around 24 investments by Blume Ventures, and around 22 investments by Chiratae Ventures. The notable investments by these investors were OYO, Grofers, Blackbuck, Freshworks, Bounce, Cred, Ninjacart, Unacademy, Spinny, Purplle, Curefit, and AgroStar.

Private equity funds, which made the majority bets, were Steadview Capital with nine investments including Ola, Unacademy and BharatPe, while General Atlantic made four investments such as No Broker and Byju’s. FMO, Sabre Partners India and CDC Group three investments each such as InCred, Waycool Foods, Rapido, HunderBox, BigBasket, Ecom Express and Indifi.

Also read: WeWork’s breakneck expansion comes to a screeching halt; growth near stalls in wake of failed IPO

In terms of top accelerators or incubators, Venture Catalysts made maximum investments — over 40 while Y Combinator invested in around 25 startups. Sequoia’s Surge, Axilor Ventures and TechStars made around 15, 11, and 10 investments respectively. Similarly, for corporates or banks investing in startups, Goldman Sachs led the tally with eight investments. Tencent, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Hyundai Motor Company, and Facebook were the other top four with seven, three, three, and two investments respectively. Facebook had backed social commerce startup Meesho.

Delhi NCR had the largest share (33 per cent) of total startups founded during 2017-19 with 2,562 startups followed by Bengaluru (21 per cent) with 1,587 startups and Mumbai (13 per cent) with 1,027 startups. However, in terms of total funding raised by these startups during the period, Bengaluru led the table (47 per cent share) with $16,799 million raised by city startups. Delhi NCR startups raised $12,596 million (35 per cent share) while Mumbai startups secured $3,911 million (11 per cent share).

The biggest acquisitions of the year were Yatra’s buyout by Ebix for $337 million, Giosis acquisition of ShopClues for $100 million and Meru’s acquisition by Mahindra for $28 million. Overall, there were 128 acquisitions. Among the IPOs, 2019 saw 4 listings including Noida-based IndiaMART with IPO market cap of $407 million and Gurugram-based mobile marketing platform Affle’s $269 million IPO market cap.