“(Prosus) Ventures, actually, has been steadily investing in some magnificent companies. That’s been in a number of exciting areas, but in particular, also in one very exciting geography, which is India,” van Dijk said.
“If you look at the capital that the Ventures team has deployed, the vast majority of it has been deployed in India. And if you take sort of the top 10 of the most exciting, fastest growing startups in India that are still private, I think we’re probably in seven out of 10 of those,” he added.
Also read | Prosus reports 80% jump in Swiggy’s Jan-Dec loss, 26% growth in food-delivery GMV
Prosus, the Dutch-listed arm of South African investment giant Naspers, has also backed companies such as Byju’s and Swiggy, and operates a payments business in India through its fintech unit PayU.
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“…if I can call out one, I think Meesho, for example, is a spectacular business that has…in terms of the number of active users, actually surpassed both Flipkart and Amazon in a very short amount of time, seeing spectacular growth and very rapidly improving unit economics,” van Dijk said during the call, the transcript of which was sourced from Seeking Alpha.
“…there’s a business like Elastic Run, Eruditus. We have the Urban Company, which is doing something very unique, which is getting to scale. There’s PharmEasy, which we’re very excited about. So, we’ve deployed a lot of capital into highly promising Indian businesses, where I think we’ll see a lot of scaling in the next few years. And I think we’ll also see the value of those companies actually rise quite significantly over the next couple of years. And we continue to look for new opportunities with the Ventures team that’s still very active,” he said.
Also read | Prosus cuts Byju’s valuation to $5.1 billion, writes off ZestMoney investment
Meanwhile, van Dijk also cautioned that the froth of the low-interest rate regime hasn’t fully been washed away yet and the ecosystem is likely to see some tempering of startup valuations, which skyrocketed over the last 2-3 years.
“In private markets, the dynamic where we’ve seen a lot of fundraising while rates were low and money was flush, that hasn’t entirely shaken out, I would say. So, what I see is that many companies that raised (funding at) high valuations basically have managed to not raise capital. The ones that did have to raise capital, typically, have seen a fairly significant haircut to their valuations,” the Prosus chief said.
“I think in the next…six months, I expect that situation to occur more often, where companies that have previously raised but are running towards the end of the funding they had put aside are going to have to come back to market. And then I do think we’ll see further correction in private valuation, because a lot of it has actually not shaken out,” he added.
In its annual report released on Tuesday, Prosus marked down the fair value of its stake in edtech Byju’s and written off its investment in troubled buy-now-pay-later startup ZestMoney.
ETtechLatest adjustment in Prosus’ fair value (FMV) for an almost 10% stake in Byju’s to $493 million as of March 2023 would translate to an enterprise valuation of about $5.1 billion, against $22 billion when the edtech company last raised an equity funding.