Mumbai headquartered Lightbox Ventures, an early-stage consumer technology venture capital firm, has raised $178 million of the targeted $200 million for its flagship third venture fund "Lightbox Ventures Fund-III", according to an SEC filing.

According to the filing, the third fund has so far raised capital from 19 limited partners.

At $200 million, it would be the largest such venture fund raised by Lightbox till date. If successfully closed, the Fund-III would bring Lightbox’s total funds raised to approximately $392.2 million to date. Earlier, Lightbox raised $38.2 million for its first fund, and about $100 for the second fund.

Lightbox has backed startups such as Faasos, Embibe, Furlenco and Droom. The firm has made a total of 11 investments so far.

Lightbox is currently led by led by Sandeep Murthy, a former general partner at Sherpalo Ventures, who started Lightbox after his old firm shifted its investment focus to the United States. LLater, other partners including Sid Talwar, Prashant Mehta, Jeremy Wenokur, and Sunny Rao joined the firm. Rao left the firm in 2016 while all other remain.

Technically speaking, Lightbox comes under the industry category of "Micro VC", a kind of venture capital where money is invested to seed early-stage emerging companies with amounts of finance that is typically less than that of traditional venture capital.

In December 2016, Lightbox had raised $54 million as an extension of its second fund of $100 million, which it had closed in late 2014, to invest in its existing portfolio start-ups. With the latest fundraise, the total funding by firm has surpassed $370 million across funds till date.

From the first fund, the firm had invested in GreenDust, ZoomIn, MapmyIndia, Paymate, FutureBazaar, and Kotak Urja. It other investments included independent mobile ad network InMobi, travel site Cleartrip, recruitment site Naukri, and Greendust.

The team of Lightbox has a mix of entrepreneurs, technologists and investors, with a global operational experience in consumer tech. according to the firm almost everyone at Lightbox has co-founded startups including Cleartrip, Newhoo (purchased by Netscape), Half.com (purchased by eBay) and Evolv (purchased by NIIT) and have also led functions at Google, eBay, Komli, IAC, Yahoo, Sony, Cleartrip, InMobi and NIIT.

It may also be recalled that besides Lightbox, VC firm Sequoia Capital also closed $695 million for its sixth India-focused fund, in late last month. In the same month, Matrix Partners India too announced it raised $300 million for its third fund.

Via ~ DealStreeatAsia, Crunchbase

[Top Image - Livemint.com]
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