JSW Ventures reaps 18x return on partial Purplle stake sell-off

Purplle co-founder and CEO Manish Taneja / Photo credit: Purplle

India-based JSW Ventures has partially sold its stake in local ecommerce firm Purplle to the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), giving JSW an 18x return on the initial capital it invested.

After the deal, the VC firm also made payouts that doubled the amount of Fund I corpus to its investors, according to a statement.

JSW Ventures focuses on SaaS as well as B2B and B2C platform firms in their pre-series A to series A+ funding stages. Its portfolio companies include Cureskin, Zvolv, and HealthPlix.

Meanwhile, beauty-focused retailer Purplle turned unicorn after it secured US$33 million in June 2022. At the time, the firm logged 7 million monthly active users, with ambitions to reach up to 8x growth within the next five years.

Founded by Manish Taneja and Rahul Dash in 2012, the India-based company has raised US$215 million to date.

The United Arab Emirates is the seventh-largest investor in India, with around US$18 billion poured into the country.

This is evident in ADIA’s increasing capital deployment in India. The government-linked body injected US$500 million into Lenskart in March this year and invested in Greenko Group that same month.

See also: Indonesian beauty firm turns $40k investment into profitable business in two years