Swiggy, Unacademy And Meesho Founders Meet With Prominent Public Market Investors

India's top mutual fund managers, who control assets worth more than $250 billion, met with the founders and senior management officials of some of the country's greatest startups, including Swiggy, Unacademy, and Meesho, earlier this week in Bengaluru.

These discussions, organised by SoftBank and JP Morgan, were intended to review company development and better understand public market investors as these companies prepare to go public. According to sources, there was no debate about the timing of the IPO. Recently, more than 14 domestic institutional investors (DIIs) went down to Bengaluru, including HDFC MF (mutual fund), Axis MF, Mirae Asset MF, ICICI Prudential, and UTI.

As many as ten unicorns, including Mamaearth, Acko, ElasticRun, and Lenskart, met with these asset managers to discuss their IPO (initial public offering) prospects. The gathering takes place at a time when numerous unicorns have openly discussed publicly listing in the medium term during the previous two years. For example, SoftBank-backed Unacademy said in February that it plans to go public within the next 24 months.

Furthermore, the interest shown by India's top DIIs demonstrates their optimism about India's well-funded startups, especially at a time when some of the unicorns that went public last year have seen their stock prices fall sharply, with public market investors raising concerns about their profitability and growth. "DIIs are a vital constituent of the Indian stock market, and they will only get more important with time,” said Sumer Juneja, Managing Partner, and India Head, SoftBank Investment Advisers.

“As more tech companies go public and become a more significant part of the indices, it is essential for these two constituents to build a relationship and understand each other better,” he stated. SoftBank, the event's organiser, had two of its largest portfolio businesses, Paytm and Policybazaar, go public in India last year. However, shares in both firms have declined by more than 50% since their initial public offerings, weighing on the Japanese investment conglomerate's public portfolio.