India saw more than US$7bn of private funding raised in the past 9 months with just 3Q15 attracting US$4bn of investments, making India as one of the biggest destinations for foreign direct investments. Global venture capital (VC) and private equity (PE) firms continue to be active on the Indian e-commerce startup scene. Besides investments from these companies, Indian startups are also witnessing large strategic investments by global majors such as Alibaba (Paytm, Snapdeal), Foxconn (Snapdeal), Didi Kuaidi (OLA) as India is fast emerging as the next big e-commerce opportunity.
Another emerging trend is the growing investments by large companies in complementary startups to enhance capacities/capabilities such as Snapdeal?s investment in GoJavas, a logistics provider, and Flipkart?s acquisition of logistics arm of WS Retail. While most of the investments are focused on the e-tail, travel/OTA segment is gaining ground with several big ticket investments in start-ups such as Ola (from Tiger Global, SoftBank, Didi Kuaidi) and OYO Rooms (from SoftBank).
