QED Investors, a US-based venture capital firm, plans to invest $250 million to $300 million in early and growth-stage startups in India and Asia Pacific.
Sandeep Patil, partner and head of Asia at QED Investors, said, "India will definitely receive the majority of the investment planned for Asia, even though we do not have a separate allocation for each geography."
With a $925 million fund raised in 2023, the fintech-focused venture firm intends to invest in Indonesia, Singapore, Japan, and throughout Asia Pacific.
Patil stated that the strategy would be to invest in growth-stage companies and follow-up rounds, in addition to early-stage investments in Asia.
"We have a growth fund and an early-stage fund," he added. "For the first cheque, we can deploy anywhere from $3 million to $20 million, and for growth stage companies, we can deploy between $20 million and $50 million."
In the last five years, QED Investors has invested approximately $220 million throughout Asia. It has made early investments in Indian startups such as neo-banking platform Jupiter, credit card sourcing platform OneCard, Upswing, which allows consumer-facing startups to offer financial services, and Efficient Capital Labs, which provides financing solutions to SaaS (software-as-a-service) companies.
QED Investors was founded in 2007 by Nigel Morris, a cofounder of the American banking corporation Capital One.
Morris' well-known early-stage venture bets include US-based personal finance startup Credit Karma, remittance startup Remitly, and Brazilian neo-bank NuBank. He is also an investor in Klarna, a major Swedish fintech company.
In December, QED Investors led a $25 million funding round for OneCard.
While the fund has not conducted a major stake sale in any of its Indian investments, Patil stated that booming public markets, with active retail institutional investor participation, and several successful startup IPOs in recent years have given global investors great confidence to invest in India.
Patil is looking for embedded finance players and those who use artificial intelligence in finance. "Embedded finance" refers to consumer-facing applications that can use unique data sets to better underwrite customers or have unique opportunities to integrate financial services into their products, he said.
