VC firm General Catalyst acquires Venture Highway to expand in India

Silicon Valley-based venture capital (VC) firm General Catalyst has acquired New Delhi-based early-stage investor Venture Highway, with plans to invest $500 million-1 billion in India.

The new entity will be called General Catalyst India and will focus on early- and growth-stage investments in the country. 

“The combined capabilities of the two firms will allow us to be much more hands-on and effective going forward in India. I am especially excited about bringing our co-creation capabilities to India,” said Hemant Taneja, chief executive of General Catalyst, in a post on X on Thursday.

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Venture Highway, which raised $78.6 million for its second fund in 2020, has investments in social-commerce startup Meesho, B2B e-commerce platform Moglix and HR-tech startup BetterPlace.

It was co-founded in 2014 by Neeraj Arora, the former chief business officer at WhatsApp. Co-founder Priya Mohan joined the team in 2018.

General Catalyst, which has backed startups such as graphic design platform Canva, travel marketplace Airbnb and fintech Stripe, manages assets worth over $25 billion globally. In India, it has backed more than a dozen startups, including fintech firm CRED and used-car marketplace Spinny. 

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Recently, several VC firms such as Accel and Nexus Venture Partners have raised upwards of $500 million each to invest in India.

India’s economic, political and strategic agency in the world is growing, supported by both macro and micro tailwinds, said General Catalyst in a blogpost on its website. It added that it is inadequate to look at India as yet another “investment destination” or “a vast geography”.

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“The country’s diverse culture, consumer psychology and deep structural idiosyncrasies need a level of understanding that numbers often do not do justice to,” the firm said.