Venture Catalysts, one of India’s first and largest early-stage investment firm, has announced full exit from its portfolio Koovers, a leading B2B e-commerce platform for auto spare parts, with 2.1x returns in just 1.5 years.
The investment firm exited Koovers post the latter’s acquisition by Schaeffler India, an industrial and automotive parts maker and listed subsidiary of German automotive major Schaeffler Group, in August, 2023. Schaeffler acquired Koovers for Rs 142.4 crore.
It was in early 2022, Venture Catalysts invested in Koovers in its pre-Series A round.
Dr Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, Founder & MD, Venture Catalysts said, “Koovers is one of the rarest startup that is not only solving a major problem in the automotive aftermarket segment but also has been posting impressive revenues year after year. We invested in the company for a long-term but the acquisition was a great exit opportunity with over 2.1x returns in just 1.5 years in a market that’s facing a longish funding winter and a liquidity crunch. These opportunities to the investors creates a huge positive impact in the entire ecosystem.”
Koovers was founded in 2015 by Vinayak YB, Sandeep Begur, and S Prem Kumar, as a B2B ecommerce platform that supplies auto spare parts to independent auto workshops (IWS) and the aftermarket ecosystem. It has clocked a revenue of Rs 77 crore in 2022-23 and supplies to over 7,000 workshops and has a portfolio of around 1.8 million parts from various manufacturers.
Sandeep Begur said, “We are quite excited to have had investors like Venture Catalysts on our captable. With their guidance under the leadership of Dr Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, we were able to achieve our growth metric goals thus creating immense value for all our investors.”
