JSW Ventures fully exits Purplle, sells stake to Manipal Group's Ranjan Pai

Ranjan Pai, chairman of Manipal Group

JSW Ventures has fully exited its shareholding in Purplle, an online retailer of beauty and personal care products, the venture capital fund said on October 30. JSW Ventures has sold its remaining shares to Manipal Group's Ranjan Pai.

The announcement comes about a month after Moneycontrol reported that Pai, the billionaire investor, is buying JSW Ventures' shares in Purplle for Rs 60-70 crore.

The transaction with Pai is the second instance where JSW Ventures is offloading shares in Purplle in a span of just five months. In May, it sold a partial stake to Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), scoring an 18X return on its initial investment, as reported earlier. 

The two transactions, totally worth around $40 million, translate to handsome returns for JSW Ventures which had first invested approximately Rs 12 crore in Purplle in 2016, according to estimates available on Tracxn, a private markets data provider.

"JSW Ventures has fully exited their stake in Purplle from Fund I and has returned 2.7x of the fund size to their investors so far," the company said in a statement.

“Purplle was one of our earliest investments as a fund in 2016 and it has delivered a 57 percent Internal Rate of Return (IRR),” said Sachin Tagra, Managing Partner at JSW Ventures.

Purplle.com was founded in 2012, and has over 1,000 brands and nearly 50,000 products on its website and app. Other  investors in the company  include homegrown private equity firm Kedaara Capital, Goldman Sachs, JSW Ventures and several others.

“With their vision and dedication, the Purplle team, has created a digital ecosystem that revolutionizes how Indian consumers discover and experience beauty products. We are excited to be part of Purplle’s journey as they scale up,”  Ranjan Pai, Chairman of the Manipal Group, said.

JSW Ventures is an early-stage institutional venture capital fund owned by the family office of the JSW Group. It invests in technology-led startups at Pre-series A to Series A stages. The fund is focused on investing in platform companies across consumer tech, health tech, B2B, agri tech, fintech and enterprise SaaS companies.

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