Prosus to take PE style bets, India one of three focus areas: CEO Bloisi

Prosus, earlier called Naspers, will focus on payments and food startups, Bloisi said in an interview, adding the investor will adopt a private equity-style model of investing in select companies, moving away from the venture capital model of investing in too many.

“India is a very important market for us at Prosus. It is, in fact, our second biggest focus area," said Bloisi, who plans to narrow Prosus's geographical focus to Latin America, Europe and India. “We will invest many more billion dollars in India in the near future," he added. Prosus has so far invested $9 billion in India.

A little over 10 months ago, Bloisi took over as CEO of Prosus, which had over $152.427 billion of assets in 2024. Earlier, he was chief executive and chairman of the group’s Brazilian food delivery business, iFood. Under his leadership, iFood grew to be the leading food delivery business in Latin America, delivering over 100 million orders per month and is highly profitable.

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Building businesses

Prosus has pumped nearly $30 million into SaaS ride-hailing platform Rapido in February this year. Last year, it also made a $100 million investment Vastu Housing Finance and acquired a 10.65% stake in supply chain financing startup Mintifi.

Globally, Prosus recently led a $15.7million funding round Egypt-based Thndr, an investment platform. It also led a $13.5 million investment round in Spanish AI company Luzia, a personal assistant app as well as a $4.3 million pre-Series A round in Zest Equity, a UAE-based digital infrastructure platform meant for simplifying private market transactions.

According to Bloisi, the firm does not want to do many deals that are small and don’t leverage its ecosystem. “When we focus more and get a new company here in India, we think about how we can get Swiggy and PayU to help this company through data, cross-sell and cost reduction," Bloisi said.

Bigger deals

“We plan on doing bigger deals in India, where we will be taking more than 5% stake in businesses. That’s definitely our intention. We can go up to 15% to 20% to even 25% in these companies. We’re also looking for many buyouts. We’re talking to companies here, we want to do more in India and invest more," said Bloisi, who is in Bengaluru for the company's annual conference.

Globally, the ball has been set rolling. Prosus has already made several acquisitions this year, including a $4.3 billion all-cash public offer to Just Eat Takeaway, a Dutch multinational online food ordering and delivery company.

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The firm, which was an early investor in companies such as PayU, Swiggy, Rapido, Meesho, and Urban Company, is now going to increasingly focus on fintech and food delivery as verticals which will make up the foundation of its India strategy.

Taking money off the table

Prosus has previously clocked stellar exits from its investments in companies such as Flipkart, MakeMyTrip and Goibibo.

After the mega public listing of food delivery startup Swiggy last year, Prosus is planning to exit via IPOs in Urban Company and Meesho over the next 12-18 months. The company is rallying behind AI and generative AI to help its businesses in India and other parts of the world grow, he said.

For India, Prosus's ambitions are high.

“We don’t have $50 billion worth of businesses outside of US and China today. We see such big businesses coming out of India going forward, and we want to help build those businesses," Bloisi said.

'$50 billion and above'

“I’m not thinking about creating a $10 to $15 billion tech company in India. I’m thinking about how we can create a $50 billion strong Indian tech player," he added.

This, he says, can be done by consolidating businesses here and doing so-called bolt-on acquisitions on existing portfolio companies. “We can consolidate the market with the intention of continuing to invest many billions in India."

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India has been a tough market for financial services investors given strict regulations on fintech companies. Asked whether over-regulation is a dampener, Bloisi said, “In the payments business, there is almost a requirement that some of it has to be regulated. I think PayU weathered that well and went through the demands of the regulator, and today is well-positioned. That said, we have to avoid the chance that because we’re over-regulating, companies choose to move much slower," said Bloisi.

“Some areas like credit need to be regulated, without which there can be constant cycles of a “bubble, then a collapse," Bloisi added.