WestBridge's fund size may touch $1 bn

WestBridge Capital, formed by one of the best-known teams in the Indian private equity industry, comprising K P Balaraj, Sandeep Singhal, Sumir Chadha and S K Jain, is beefing up its fund corpus from $500 million to $1 billion.

The four private equity veterans have been together for the past 14 years and across six funds totalling $2 billion.

WestBridge Capital has already raised the first tranche of $300 million, taking the fund size to $800 million; the remaining $200 million is expected to be raised soon. Senior private equity fund managers said WestBridge was investing aggressively in the Indian public markets.

The four came together during 2000 to raise their first WestBridge fund with a corpus of $135 million and subsequently, another $200 million, before aligning their operations with Sequoia Capital, another global venture capital in India.

Later, through their partnership with Sequoia in India, they raised $1.4 billion across three funds and during 2011, they parted ways with Sequoia to focus on WestBridge to primarily invest in public markets and with a small presence in private equity space as well.

WestBridge Capital is understood to have completed its first closure of $500 million within two months during 2011 and the top-up of another $500 million has been tied up within the same period of time. Sandeep Singhal, managing director of WestBridge Capital, declined to comment on the fund size crossing the $1-billion mark. WestBridge has reportedly raised the subsequent funds from the same pool of 14 global investors including some of the marquee global family offices, endowment and sovereign funds.

WestBridge Capital works under an evergreen fund model, in which their investors bank on them to increase the value of the asset and is not structured as a typical limited partner (LP), who would look at taking out their returns after a certain fund life. WestBridge has a notional life of 20 years and their LPs have the option to press for liquidity after an initial five-year lock-in period.

It is understood that WestBridge Capital has invested around $400 million from its corpus and has during the past three years made one private equity bet on Dr Lal Pathlabs, a chain of pathology labs. WestBridge had earlier backed some of the great success stories in India including Cafe Coffee Day, Vasan Eye Care, marketRx, Indecomm, Just Dial, Naukri.com and SKS Microfinance. Even as the fund is going aggressively on the public markets, it is now pursuing a new approach of executing negotiated private deals in publicly-held companies. Recent such investments include Kajaria Ceramics and DFM Foods, among others.