Sequoia will continue to invest in the U.S. and Europe. Its China business will keep its name in Chinese and be known as in English. And the India and Southeast Asia business will become .��

“It has become increasingly complex to run a decentralized global investment business,” the firm said in its announcement signed by the leaders of each of its regional funds. But more significantly, as local companies compete on a global basis, the firm is seeing more portfolio conflicts which could lead to passing on opportunities to invest in competitive sectors.��

Even within a region, the firm faces an issue with competition. Sequoia divested from due to perceived competition in payments with its portfolio company . In an interview with , the firm said the breakup is .��

‘Patient capital’

Sequoia Capital had already made a significant change to its fund structure in recent years. It announced that a single fund for its U.S. and European business would distribute to sub-funds, stating the “10-year fund cycle has become obsolete.” As part of that November 2021  announcement, months before the market correction, Sequoia restructured itself as a registered investment adviser. This new role allowed the firm to set itself up to retain stock when its private companies go public, and to invest in public companies as well as opportunities in crypto and Web3.��

In an early 2021 interview, the firm’s steward emphasized the firm’s “patient capital” approach. The firm will often wait years before it disperses shares to shareholders, he said.��

“Sometimes people don’t realize how patient we are,” Botha said “And we’ve earned this right with our LPs, to have patience with distributions.”

The regional funds have operated from the start with a “local-first” approach. The India fund was launched in 2000 and the China-based fund in 2005. Each business will become fully independent by March 31, 2024.��

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India—which like many regions had a banner year in 2021—is one of those areas seeing the most pronounced decline.

Funding in India dropped to its lowest point since the first quarter of 2020. VC-backed companies took in $2.9 billion in the third quarter of this year, a massive 66% drop from the previous quarter and a mind-blowing 81% drop from the same quarter last year.

Deal flow did not see nearly as major a dropoff, but numbers were still down. Just more than 420 deals were announced in Q3, a 12% drop from the second quarter and a 32% decrease from the same period last year.

“The funding environment globally has weakened significantly, and India is no different,” said , managing director at .��

“We have seen several hedge funds and global investors without local/regional presence recede from the market to focus on core markets,” said Ravishankar, adding the dramatic drop should also be seen in the context of a very exuberant market in 2021.

Asia’s issues

To that point, India certainly is not alone in the dropoff. Venture funding in Asia sank to its lowest level in 10 quarters, mirroring what is going on in the public markets, and investors slowed funding to private companies with only $21.2 billion for startups in the region. That is a 26% decrease from the second quarter and an astonishing 56% decrease from the third quarter of last year. The total funding amount marked the lowest investment since the first quarter of 2020, when the world was just entering into a pandemic.

Many likely would point toward China for such a decline, especially with the regulatory crackdown on tech firms there. While China’s numbers have dipped significantly quarter to quarter—Chinese startups saw only $9.6 billion invested last quarter, compared to $18.5 billion in the same quarter of 2021—India took a more pronounced decline in venture funding by percentage.

“There has been a significant pullback from the large crossover funds—, , etc.,” said , co-founder of New Delhi-based . “These funds typically led later-stage rounds with significant checks, so their retrenchment shows up as a big drop in the amount of funding.”

The numbers bear out that large late-stage and growth rounds—where crossover funds normally participate—did take the biggest drop in India during the third quarter. The quarter saw only $1.5 billion go to Indian startups for those late, large rounds—a 76% drop from the second quarter, which saw $6.2 billion invested in such rounds.

Even more dramatically, the Q3 numbers represent a 89% decline from $13.6 billion invested in Q3 2021.

Those numbers are not shocking, as late-stage and growth rounds are also down in the U.S. and globally, but it does show the trend is affecting areas with even less mature tech startup ecosystems.

Ravishankar said growth and late-growth rounds are being the most impacted, due to the IPO windows being shut and therefore companies don’t have near-term liquidity prospects.��

That is not to say there were not some large rounds in the region in the third quarter. Edtech giant closed a venture round worth approximately $210 million in August and fintech platform raised a $100 million Series D, minting it as a unicorn in July.

However, such large deals have become few and far between as investors become more wary of spending big money in large valuations and large crossover investors pull back.

Early and seed

All that is not to say earlier rounds have not been affected.

Seed and angel funding—which totaled about $400 million in Q3—in the region fell about 16% quarter to quarter and 4% year to year.

Early-stage funding hit approximately $1 billion in the third quarter, falling 47% from the second quarter and 32% from Q3 2021.

“Early stage seems to have recovered in the last few weeks and we are seeing some buoyancy return here,” Ravishankar said.

What’s next?

The current downturn has affected most sectors, including SaaS, fintech and B2B, Ravishankar said.��

“But certain sectors like edtech have been even more impacted as a result of the strong comeback of offline markets,” Ravishankar said. “On the positive side, there is more demand for consumer and financial services businesses that are profitable and compounding.”

Just like in the U.S., investors are eyeing strong cash flow and profitability or at least a road map to it.

“The downturn has affected all companies, but companies in spaces that have high growth but unclear monetization” have been hit hardest, Verma said. “Three words—path to profitability—have made a resurgence.”

While investors are not expecting that to change in the near future and believe the fourth quarter may resemble the currently ended third, some light remains at the end of the tunnel.

“We expect the rest of the year to continue to be slow and all eyes are on the actions of the U.S. ����,” Ravishankar said. “We are cautiously optimistic about 2023 as there are several funds that have raised significant capital in 2021/2022 and they would look to pick interesting opportunities in the market.”

Verma adds that while more short-term pain is likely, from a longer-term point of view this is a great time to be investing.

“We will also see more (local institutions and families) bring later-stage capital to the table, making for a more resilient ecosystem in future,” Verma said.

Methodology

The data contained in this report comes directly from Crunchbase, and is based on reported data. Data reported is as of Oct. 3, 2022.

Note that data lags are most pronounced at the earliest stages of venture activity, with seed funding amounts increasing significantly after the end of a quarter/year.

Please note that all funding values are given in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. Crunchbase converts foreign currencies to U.S. dollars at the prevailing spot rate from the date funding rounds, acquisitions, IPOs and other financial events are reported. Even if those events were added to Crunchbase long after the event was announced, foreign currency transactions are converted at the historic spot price.

Glossary of funding terms

Seed and angel consists of seed, pre-seed and angel rounds. Crunchbase also includes venture rounds of unknown series, equity crowdfunding and convertible notes at $3 million (USD or as-converted USD equivalent) or less.

Early stage consists of Series A and Series B rounds, as well as other round types. Crunchbase includes venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $3 million, and those less than or equal to $15 million.

Late stage consists of Series C, Series D, Series E and later-lettered venture rounds following the “Series [Letter]” naming convention. Also included are venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $15 million.

Technology growth is a private-equity round raised by a company that has previously raised a “venture” round. (So basically, any round from the previously defined stages.)

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Other global hubs, including Seattle, Bangalore and Beijing, have even shorter track records for startup funding. And tech hotspots like Austin and Sao Paolo, have really taken off only in the past few years.

So which places are set to be the next growth centers of startup action? For this latest Crunchbase slideshow, we perused our country-by-country funding data to pinpoint which nations are seeing the biggest jumps in funding activity.

Click through to see which countries saw the biggest year-over-year investment gains. The tabulations also include a look at deal counts, top cities for startups and notable rounds.*

*For this dataset, we did not include seed financings, focusing only on venture rounds of Series A and beyond.��

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Before that, let’s just get a picture of how the city’s scene has grown over time. According to Crunchbase data, both deal and dollar volume is increasing over time. Last year, Bengaluru saw a specifically cash-strong year with on-demand food delivery startup .

Now let’s start with the news, literally.

Lokal

wants to make local news in India more accessible and digitally focused, from big cities to small villages. Through an app, Lokal wants to offer multilingual local news to users in different regions around India.

It has raised $3 million in funding from , , , , and . Other investors include co-founder and .

Digitized news is a busy sector, with apps like and already comfortably powering millions of articles and users a day with local news. The key with Lokal is a localized experience right down to the language (it is unclear how many languages the company offers currently).

The Y Combinator-backed startup was founded by and in 2018. According to Pasha, Lokal is operational in three of India’s most concentrated states, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Uttar Pradesh. It targets more than 900 million non-english speaking users in India.

In addition to news, Lokal offers digitized classified ads, a “large and lucrative opportunity” according to a partner at . I imagine the opportunity he’s talking about is for advertisers, who have largely lost out on classifieds in traditional news outlets.

With that under our belts, let’s move to a later stage company founded in February 2016 that is finally getting some traction from investors.

YourOwnROOM

Founded by , , and , connects millennials to rental properties, from fully furnished shared rooms to private rooms and full houses.

The company raised $1.3 million in a seed round this week, bringing its total known funding to $2.1 million,.

When I saw this startup, I immediately thought of as a San Francisco counterpart, and one one of the other startups in the growing industry of tech-enhanced rental properties. describes itself as “smartly furnished neighborhood homes for extended stays.” One of Zeus’ gaps is that it is only in the United States in big cities for now (including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Washington D.C., and New York City).

I think the value proposition that a company like YourOwnROOM has, then, must be its deep relationships with Bengaluru’s residential asset owners, developers, building owners and individual homeowners. Plus, that becomes even more important as through fake documents.

There is a unicorn in the room, however. , a hotel marketplace company reportedly worth $5 billion, is pushing into the housing space through OYO living. in cities across India, including Bengaluru. As we reported previously, Gurgaon, India-based OYO has raised so much money that the company is distorting India’s venture market, accounting for the lion’s share of the past year’s total funding in India’s hospitality startups. YourOwnROOM will have its work cut out for it in order to differentiate.

Finally, let’s move on from rooms and into what is inside of them: furniture.

Urban Ladder

, launched by and in July 2012, sells furniture through an online marketplace, offering everything from sofas and beds to storage shelves and dining tables.

The company raised $2.1 million in a financing round this week. Investors in the company include SAIF Partners, Trifecta Capital, Sequoia Capital India, and Steadview Capital. , Urban Ladder has $114.9 million in known venture funding to date.

Beyond the classics, Urban ladder it offers both modern and traditional designs and “products that are difficult to spot elsewhere during furniture online shopping; for example room dividers, corner storage units, and more.”

The company recently opened up physical stores to bring its online products to Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai, Mumbai, and Delhi.

It’s not immediately clear what differentiates Urban Ladder from IKEA – but , the startup isn’t intimidated by the behemoth expanding in its region. In the same story, , Urban Ladder’s founder and CEO, said that ’s strength is homewares, while Urban Ladder’s strength is in furniture.

“Generally speaking, IKEA is an early starter household brand, like a few fresh college graduates moving into and setting up an apartment together. And that’s an area that nobody can beat them in. That’s not a market we are present in. We believe we know how to service a customer who is starting to move forward in life,” said Goel.

To Close

That’s a quick snapshot of some activity happening in Bangalore, a growing startup hub in India that has scored over in the Crunchbase data set. We have more in the works on this region’s struggles and strengths as a hub, but in the meantime send any tips to me at natasha@crunchbase.com or by tweeting me .

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The acquisition, announced on Monday, will help the travel company further refine its pricing, manage inventory, and manage revenue, according to a statement provided by OYO to Crunchbase News. The roll out will start with Europe, which adds to OYO’s promise to invest €300 million in the vacation homes business, “with a special focus on strengthening the relationship with homeowners and enabling them with the resources,” according to the aforementioned statement.

, OYO offers hotel rooms for rental. It optimizes budget hotel rooms and leases them out to individuals and offers fresh linens, wifi and tech support. In India’s fragmented hotel industry, OYO’s model is apparently in demand as the company has raised $1.7 billion in known venture capital funding and acquired seven companies to-date, .

“Data sciences across Pricing, AI, and Imaging Sciences have been a cornerstone of OYO’s proprietary revenue enhancement technology. It is also a huge missing piece in the way traditional vacation rentals industry is run,” said , the global head of OYO Vacation and Urban Homes and chief strategy officer of OYO Hotels & Home, in the statement.

It’s notable that $10 million isn’t much for a company that has raised billions in the past. In fact, as I reported back in June, OYO raised so much money at that point that it is distorting India’s venture market, accounting for 92 percent of the past year’s total funding in India’s hospitality startups.

In the past, OYO’s CEO has credited his company’s proprietary technology for its competitive edge amid other travel giants in the world. But as it expands (the company currently hosts guests around the world in over 23,000 franchised and leased hotels in 800 cities in 19 countries across the world, ), the extra help might be what it needs to keep up.

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As the famed early-stage accelerator ups the amount of startups it invests in each year, India has become a focus. In this summer’s batch, 12 startups were from India, compared to five from the same time period a year prior. Applications to the accelerator from India increased by 50 percent, too.

, a partner at YC and the previous founder of Homejoy, even lived in India for a month prior to the pitch day to “get a sense of what the Indian consumer was like.” Then, Cheung and three other YC partners conducted 140 interviews with Indian startups from ’s headquarters, a YC alum backed by Facebook. About 8 percent of those startups were accepted.

Before we learn more about those startups, here’s a teaser for you: Cheung told me that India, like China, was previously known to “copy cat things that worked in the U.S.”

“But now they’re distinctly not doing that, they’re coming out with these big products,” she said during a phone call Wednesday.

Now, onto the big products.

The WhatsApp Wave

During YC Demo Day, a few founders cited WhatsApp as part of their business strategy, specifically its growth and influence within India.

wants to leverage WhatsApp to match low-skilled and skilled workers with on-demand companies that need labor. , the founder of the company, said WhatsApp has 400 million users in India, and 96 percent of smartphone users in the region use WhatsApp.

Cheung said that she always tells startups to “take advantage of what [is] in front of them.” Since WhatsApp is allowing people to build atop them right now, now is the time to leverage the platform for customer acquisition, she added.

In some ways, it’s a gamble. Building your startup atop a social media platform is risky. At any given time, the company can stop sharing access to its API. It could, in theory, kill your business on a whim and get away with it. The concept isn’t crazy: , and Google’s also impacted competitors.

But Krishna assured me that he’s working with WhatsApp “pretty closely” to secure a solid relationship. If not, the 12 million on-demand workers, and 320 low-skilled workers, could lose the app.

also said during its presentation that it would acquire customers through to build out its online pharmacy in India, citing the messaging app’s prominence in the area.

Cheung said she thinks we’re going to see a “flood of really big startups built on top of WhatsApp” but that startups need to not be reliant on just one platform. Diversification equals protection.

The Indian Consumer

One surprise from pitch day in Bangalore, according to Cheung, was that Indian startups were straying from a once-normal stereotype: Global SaaS companies.

“They’re building for the Indian consumer,” she said.

Take , for example. The company is connecting gas stations to truck drivers, and delivers fuel directly to customers.��CEO told me that he is offering an app to truck drivers that allows them to request gas delivery. There’s a live dashboard at their fingertips, he said.��Plus, Gupta said, MyPetrolPump is helping everyone avoid fuel theft.

“Fuel theft happens here,” he told me. “You’ll find that drivers collude with operators of gas stations in India.” MyPetrolPump managing that transaction will help create balance, he hopes. The company raised $1.6 million last month from Y Combinator and . Now, Gupta said he is working to raise a $10 million Series A round.

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Another consumer-friendly startup is . It wants to make podcasts more accessible and understandable to people around India. On stage during Demo Day, a co-founder said that half a billion people are coming online in India—but there is no podcast platform that works well there.

“Spotify has no traction, and the only available audio content is on YouTube, which gives broken audio,” the company said. So, they’re working with 2,500 creators to bring audio in every Indian language to the populace.

And with that we’ll step back and take a balcony view of YC’s tagline: “Make something people want.” It seems from this recent crop of startups, that’s exactly what India’s entrepreneurs have been doing.

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Founded in 2015, Sharechat is considered to be India’s “.” It currently reportedly has 60 million monthly users across 15 regional languages, according to TechCrunch.

The news isn’t entirely a surprise as a few regional publications, including and , reported in June that the deal was in the works.

The round is notable in that it gives Twitter a foothold in one of the world’s largest countries and marks its first significant commitment into another region outside the U.S. Founder and CEO had firsthand involvement in securing the financing, according to . By investing in Sharechat, Twitter will have the ability to “go deeper into India’s smaller towns at a time when its user growth has plateaued,” noted the Times.

, , , SAIF Capital, and , also participated in the financing. With this round, Bangalore-based Sharechat has , according to Crunchbase data. It last raised in September 2018 led by China’s .

While Twitter has acquired dozens of companies, it’s only , including Sharechat, according to Crunchbase data. This round marks its first time leading an investment.

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Sound a little odd? Well, apparently not.

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  (and reports by and ) Delhi-based raised $1.7 million in seed funding so we can all meet “verified” new friends through theme-based house parties in Delhi, Gurgaon, and Bangalore.

The seed round included investors like , and .1 , chief strategy officer at also participated in the round, . The startup also previously was in .

From classic dinners to salsa parties to rooftop bonfires, the website offers an array of social gatherings with open doors. At least, for those that will pay.

A neon glow house party, for example, is about  ₹750, or $11 dollars per person to attend. In the advertisement for the party, a recommended age range is also set. The aforementioned party, for example, is . Think of it as a party, but with profit. The average host profit is ₹3,700, or about $54 dollars.

The concept is catching on. In a blog post on the site, company founders wrote that they have helped more than 2,500 strangers meet someone new. “People have made friends in the new city they moved to, found their next coffee dates, got jobs, business partners and met new people with same interests,” the website reads.

I don’t know who the main competitors would be, other than, say a bar during happy hour. The startup wants to offer a place that makes meeting new people fun and safe, “without burning a hole in the pocket,” .

Some say it’s the . I would go more with the for friends. Maybe, the for Friday night plans? On its website, MyScoot promises it with a “5 step verification process to make sure you attend fun, creep free parties.” It claims its 150 parties so far have all gone on without “a single mishap.”

All of a sudden, paying for a party that promises to be creep-free doesn’t seem so odd after all.

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If you recall our recent work regarding — better known by its former name WeWork — you can see where we’re going with this. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

OYO’s New Valuation

Crunchbase News first covered OYO, an Indian company building low-cost hotels around the world, in September of 2018 when the Vision Fund into the company. Noting that normally “hospitality is a bit afar from the world of high-growth startups and their attendant sectors and investors,” we were surprised at the scale of capital that OYO was putting to work.

A company working to invest $1 billion in growth capital is very much our jam, meaning that OYO has been on our radar since that key investment.

And we’re not the only folks with one eye on the rocketship hotel-focused startup. The firm has raised three primary rounds since, including with , with several groups including , and from .

As you can see, a number of platform-aspirant companies (ride-hailing apps all want to become super apps, and Airbnb as a “people-to-people platform”) are putting cash into OYO as it looks like a future partner and integration mark.

Having some of the most highly-valued private companies in the world line up to put money into your growth-oriented business is a mark of confidence. As such, we can presume that OYO’s growth rates are very high. I’d also toss in that the company is probably pretty unprofitable today; recall how Luckin’s insane build-out translated to sharp deficits as it grew.

All this money and optimism brings us to today’s news. Here’s the impending $2 billion transaction that will reprice OYO far above its prior worth:

Oyo Chief Executive Ritesh Agarwal is buying part of the shareholdings of early investors Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The buyback, which is still subject to shareholder and regulatory approvals, will be through a Cayman Islands company called RA Hospitality Holdings, and financed by institutional banks and finance partners, the company said.

The secondary transaction gives OYO a shiny new $10 billion valuation, pushing the hotel chain into the decacorn range, and making it part of a far more elite club than its prior unicorn horn society.

Secondaries, Redux

News last week that WeWork’s founder has sold or borrowed against a piece of his stake in his own firm. It wasn’t the best timing for the company, which is both looking for additional debt capital and an IPO.

But, as with all things, if WeWork’s S-1 drops and shows solid growth and paring losses, no one will care what Neumann did before the numbers were shared; that ‘growth cures all ills’ is a market adage is no accident.

But what did catch my eye is that in the case of OYO, we’re seeing a founder work to recapture share in his company, instead of potentially reducing their exposure. It seems tonally important.

In the venture capital world, you’ll often here about “signaling.” Perhaps “signaling risk” is a better way to phrase it. There were, once upon a time, a set of unwritten rules in venture regarding what various moves would “signal” to the market. For example, if you raised a round from Billy Bob Capital, and then raised your next round from Billy Bob Capital, that was read as a “signal” that you couldn’t find a new lead investor for the new capital event.

In 2019 all that action might indicate is that Billy Bob Capital was desperate to double-down on the deal to fend off dilution by preempting the round before someone else could swoop in. So, things have changed.

But no matter what has changed in the world of venture, seeing a founder seek to control more of their company �ɳ󾱱�����it is in hyper-growth mode is pretty bullish I reckon. We’ll see a WeWork S-1 before we see a similar filing from OYO, but the former will inform the latter.

And given that OYO is taking baby steps towards WeWork’s bread and butter, this is all going to get even more interesting.

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Osmo develops and launched its app and a suite of educational toys that interact with its software platform through the camera of an iPad or Kindle Fire tablet. Kids can learn basic problem solving and spatial reasoning with these toys and through the game-like interface of the application.

Prior to its acquisition, Osmo had raised in outside funding, the last of which arrived in . , , and , among , are investors in Osmo. The company will continue operating as a separate brand of hardware and software products after the transaction is complete, according to a statement from the company. Osmo is Palo Alto-based and has about 60 employees.

, co-founder and CEO of Osmo, told Crunchbase News in a phone interview that the deal made strategic sense for both companies and kind of came by surprise.

Three months ago, Sharma said, Osmo had almost closed a new round of funding (for what would have been its Series C), when he met , co-founder and CEO of ���۴���’S. Realizing they had similar backgrounds—both working in educational technology, both hailing from small villages in India—and complementary businesses, acquisition talks proceeded quickly. “We made the decision within a week,” according to Sharma.

“Platform-thinking is in our DNA,” said Sharma, who, alongside his co-founder , quit software engineering jobs at Google to start Osmo. According to Raveendran, ���۴���’S had been focused on “building a content-driven platform” built around what he referred to as “the DNA of learning.” Add to that that Osmo already had traction in a market segment and geography ���۴���’S wanted to expand, and you’ve got a corporate genetic match.

Raveendran said he’s known about Osmo’s product for awhile. ���۴���’S had been working to develop and roll out content for a younger audience, aimed at kids between the ages of three and eight. Accordingly, Raveendran had a professional interest in tracking the market for young kids’ educational products, but he also had a personal reason: “I have a five year-old son, and he’s been playing with Osmo for the past eight months.”

Raveendran said that ���۴���’S currently has “over 1,000 people” working on video content and game development.

“This makes us one of the biggest studios in India,” he said. Raveendran said his company is growing revenues by ten percent month-over-month. The application has 30 million registered students, two million of which pay for a subscription.

Osmo is the first U.S.-based company that ���۴���’S has acquired, but it has made in the past. in the education technology company include , , , and the .

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