Vikram Chopra spent the past three years building an online furniture-shopping site for Indian consumers that was funded mainly by annual capital injections from a German technology incubator.
But during the past few months, investor interest in the site, FabFurnish.com, has soared, said the 32-year-old entrepreneur, who is based in the New Delhi suburb of Gurgaon. Several global venture-capital firms and hedge funds have said they are interested in investing, and Mr. Chopra is now considering another round of funding that would exceed the $20 million raised so far—even though he doesn’t expect FabFurnish to be profitable for another two years and doesn’t yet need the cash.
“A few years ago, everybody wanted to see profitability upfront,” said Mr. Chopra. “Today, it is more like how much money you need to curb the competition [and] kill everyone else.”
Global money is flooding into Indian startups as investors search for a successor to Alibaba Group Holding, the Chinese e-commerce company that raised a record $25 billion in its initial public offering last year.
Venture capitalists sank $4 billion into India last year in some 300 deals—almost twice as much money as they invested in 2013 and 14 times the level of a decade ago, according to Indian data tracker Venture Intelligence.
via India’s Billion-Dollar Startups Balloon on Glut of Global Funds – India Real Time – WSJ.
