“Sequoia helps daring founders build legendary companies, from idea to IPO and beyond.

Sequoia India operates in Southeast Asia and India where they actively partner with founders from a
wide range of companies, across categories. Sequoia Capital India Advisors Private Limited provides
investment advisory services. The Company offers investment management, financial planning, and
consulting services. Sequoia Capital India Advisors operates worldwide.

Sequoia Capital India Advisors Private Limited is a Private incorporated on 21 June 2000. It is classified as
Non-govt Company and is registered at Registrar of Companies, Bangalore. Its authorized share capital is
Rs. 100,000,000 and its paid up capital is Rs. 26,734,380. It is involved in other financial intermediation.

There are many top names in startups under the hood including BYJUs, Carousell, Druva, GO-JEK, OYO
Rooms, Tokopedia, Truecaller, Zilingo, Zomato and more.

In partnering with Sequoia, startups benefit from 47 years of tribal knowledge and lessons learned
working with companies like Airbnb, Alibaba, Apple, Dropbox, Google, JD.com, LinkedIn, Meituan and
Stripe early on.

From the beginning, non-profits have been the backbone of LP base, which means founders’
accomplishments make a meaningful difference. The majority of the profits – over $16 billion since 2000
alone – are returned to great causes, like the Ford Foundation, Mayo Clinic and MIT.

Sequoia has 7 funds till now, and have done one investment acquisition. Also, there are 377 investments
with 35 exits so far.

They have started a new program – Surge

Surge is a rapid scale-up program for start-ups, created to give founders “an unfair advantage” to scale
and grow, make smart business model choices at the start, and raise a Series A round soon after.

Highlights of the program:

 Capital: Surge will invest $1.5M in every start-up that is a part of Surge, before the start of the
program or at very close to the start. This will enable founders to get the best of the talent for
the team and for growth investments.
 Mentors: Surge will provide the young founders mentoring from esteemed mentors. These
mentors are some of the most accomplished founders and technology executives of this region,
including Byju Raveendran, Carousell's Siu Rui Quek, Cred's Kunah Shah, Freshwork's Girish
Mathrubootham, GO-JEK's Nadiem Makarim, Google's Rajan Ananadan, Insider's Hande Cilinger,
Mad Street Den's Ashwini Asokan, OYO's Ritesh Agarwal, Uber's Amit Jain, WhatsApp's Neeraj
Arora, Zilingo's Ankiti Bose, Zomato's Deepinder Goyal and more.
 Collaboration: Surge is open-architecture. Seed funds, angels, VC's are welcome to participate in
funding rounds - not just at UpSurge Week, but at the beginning, too.

There are new funding round happened to the tune of $1.35 Bn from LPs which will be used for two new
funds, one venture fund of $525 Mn and another growth fund of $825 Mn.

Sequoia India now operates seed, venture and growth funds, a structure that allows Sequoia to remain a
relevant partner for founders at all stages of their journey.
In few of the companies, it has invested on various steps such as seed, venture as well as growth phases.
So, the investing style is quite unique because of the expanse of investing strategy that it follows. Not
just limiting it to pre-seed, seed, angel or VC. It invests in various phases of the company’s growth,
therefore they have substantial stake in many unicorns in India.

Sequoia has started with investing in investing in R3+ where they used to look at the growth phase and
established brands. But over the years the investing strategy has been accustomed to India’s ecosystem
which has helped the company transform its investing strategy to favor the ecosystem. Indian
ecosystem has evolved a lot from last two decades when Sequoia entered Indian market. Entrepreneurs
are having much more resilience which has given investors a confidence to invest in early stage startups
which is much more lucrative and align with the strategy of “helping daring founders build legendary
companies”.

Sequoia has invested in following industries:

 IT & ITES
 Education
 BFSI
 Telecom and Transport
 Advertising & Marketing
 Food & Beverages
 Engg. & Construction
 Manufcaturing
 Textiles and Garments
 FMCG
 Travel

It has also invested with co investors which are Co-invested (where other investors are international
such as DSG, Qualgro, SIG, Airtree Ventures, etc) or India-dedicated (where all other investors are also
focused on Indian startups explicitly).

The ways in which we can adjudge the performance of any VC are shown below:

TVPI

TVPI is short for Total Value to Paid In capital multiple. Essentially, it’s the total value of the fund’s
holdings (realized and unrealized) divided by the capital that has been called by the fund (or paid in by
the LPs). One can think of this somewhat like a multiple, although it’s a little bit different since it also is
inclusive of the effect of fees, recycling, etc.

Quick example, let’s say a VC has a $100M fund. If they have called 50% of the capital ($50M), returned
$20M to their investors from exits, and the remaining portfolio is worth $55M, then TVPI = ($20 + $55) /
$50 = 1.5.

DPI
DPI is Distributions to Paid in Capital multiple. This is how much money a VC fund has sent back to LPs
divided by the amount of money the LP has paid into the fund. The denominator for TVPI and DPI are
the same. Ultimately, when a fund is all said and done, DPI is effectively the fund’s multiple.

When you hear about 3X funds, 7X funds, etc., this should be DPI. Although some investors like to brag
about their impressive TVPI like it’s a true fund multiple, even though the majority of the value has yet
to be realized (more on this later).

IRR

IRR is the Internal Rate of Return for the fund. It is an approximation of the the rate of appreciation of
the fund’s assets. This can theoretically be used to compare the performance of a VC fund to other asset
classes and even public market indexes