Peak XV Taps India’s IPO Boom With Meesho, Wakefit Trading Debuts In December

Shailendra Singh, managing partner of Peak XV (formerly Sequoia Capital India) speaks during the Singapore FinTech Festival in Singapore on Nov. 3, 2022.

© 2022 Bloomberg Finance LP

Venture capital firm Peak XV (formerly Sequoia Capital India & Southeast Asia) is tapping India’s IPO boom with its portfolio companies including e-commerce firm Meesho and mattress maker Wakefit Innovations are preparing to list this month.

Meesho—whose IPO was oversubscribed nearly 80 times—is set to raise as much as 54.2 billion rupees ($602 million) from its maiden share sale. Bengalaru, India-based Wakefit will start marketing its IPO this week.

India is among the world’s busiest listing venues, with more than 300 companies raising 1.77 trillion rupees from their IPOs so far this year, already surpassing the record proceeds of 1.73 trillion rupees from maiden share sales set in the whole of 2024, data compiled by Bloomberg showed.

“The big thing in India is that it has very strong domestic pools of capital and it’s no longer reliant on foreign flows like it was a decade ago,” Shailendra Singh, managing partner of Peak XV, said in a recent interview with Forbes Asia via zoom. “It has proven to be very resilient and somewhat decoupled from global markets.” India is among the best performing stock markets in Asia with its benchmark equity index up more than 9% this year.

Amid India’s IPO boom, more than 10 of Peak XV’s portfolio companies have listed in the past two years, the latest of which are payments platform Pine Labs and Billionbrains Garage Ventures, the parent of Indian online discount stock brokerage Groww.

Billionbrains is among the best performing maiden share sales in India this year, surging as much as 89% from its IPO price of 100 rupees apiece in its first week of trading. The sharp gains in November catapulted cofounder and CEO Lalit Keshre briefly into billionaire ranks. His net worth has since shrank to about $940 million based on Billionbrains’ closing price of 151.64 rupees on Monday, according Forbes’ estimates.

Following the stellar performance of Billionbrains and Pine Labs, Peak XV is looking to list more of its portfolio companies. Meesho (which also counts billionaire Mayayoshi Son’s SoftBank among its backers) will start trading on Wednesday, while Wakefit, which aims to raise as much as 12.9 billion rupees from its IPO, will have its market debut next week.

“This year is one of our busiest IPO years in the last decade and likely the strongest in terms of overall capital raised,” Singh said.

Peak XV—which split with U.S. venture capital firm Sequoia Capital in June 2023—has assets under management of more than $9 billion, primarily in Indian and Southeast Asian startups. The decision to split with Sequoia Capital was largely driven by how best to manage diverging funds and competition between rival startups in each portfolio. Rising tensions between the U.S. and China also played a role.

While Peak XV, has remained focused on Asia since the split, the fund has been investing globally, particularly in early and growth stage deals in Silicon Valley. “We’re focused more on cross border investing,” Singh said. “We’re trying to be a very high quality partner for founders seeking to build a global company out of the Asia Pacific.”