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From left: Barath Shankar Subramanian, Abhinav Chaturvedi and Prayank Swaroop, partners at Accel
Image: Hemant Mishra for Forbes India
Chennai, circa 2011: Shekhar Kirani had sniffed an untapped opportunity. Kirani, who joined global venture investment firm Accel as a partner the same year after stints with two Silicon Valley-based startups, knew the nuances and magic of the subscription business. Both his former companies (LightSurf and StarFish) made loads of money and got eventually sold to Motorola and VeriSign. So when the young venture capitalist (VC) started hunting for his maiden investment, SaaS (software as a service) turned out to be his first segment of choice. He zeroed in on Freshdesk, a SaaS-based social customer support startup co-founded by Girish Mathrubootham and Shanmugam Krishnasamy in 2010. “I knew what SaaS meant, and how powerful subscriptions could be,” he recalls.
Vietnam’s digital wallet provider
MoMo reveals that it has secured $100 million in capital via its Series D funding round, which was co-led by Goodwater, a Silicon Valley-based fund, and Warburg Pincus.
New investors also made contributions to MoMo’s investment round, including Kora Management and Macquarie Capital, and other existing investors such as Affirma Capital and Tybourne Capital Management took part in the round as well.
The funds raised will be used to create a new
super app service, improve MoMo’s ecosystem for merchants and Vietnamese consumers, and establish MoMo Innovation Ventures, a project for making strategic investments in Vietnam-based firms with the potential to be integrated into MoMo’s evolving ecosystem.