Popular craft beer maker Bira 91 is raising $4.3 million from Mumbai-based consumer-focused venture capital fund Sixth Sense Ventures. The funding raising in a pre-Series C round is a bridge round to its Series C round that the company is looking to raise.
The company has labelled the securities as pre-Series C preference shares, showed regulatory filings sourced by business signals platform Paper.vc.
“This is an unusual nomenclature that suggests that Bira 91 is looking to secure a larger Series C round at a suitable valuation,” Vivek Durai, Founder, Paper.vc told Financial Express Online.
Bira 91 has so far raised $74 million in equity financing as per the documents and counts celebrities Farhan and Zoya Akhtar and film producer Ritesh Sidhwani along with Flipkart’s CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy and a group of General Atlantic executives among its investors.
“Following this round, our estimate of Bira 91’s valuation stands at $246 million with Sequoia Capital as its largest institutional investor,” said Durai. Bira 91 last raised $50 million, announced in May last year, at a reported valuation of around $210 million.
5 lakh pre-Series C compulsorily convertible cumulative preference shares were issued to Sixth Sense Ventures that invested from its India Opportunities – II fund. The resolution for funding was passed on May 29.
Bira 91 other investors include Snapdeal’s Rohit Bansal, Zomato co-founder Deepinder Goyal, TR Capital, Anicut Capital, Sofina, and Smile Group, as per deals tracker Crunchbase.
Bira 91 competes with other beer startups in the verticals including White Owl, Simba, Brewbot, White Rhino, Kati Patang, etc. The startup was launched in 2015 by Ankur Jain after he started importing exotic beers from outside India to sell in 2008.
India’s beer market revenue stood at $14,188 million in 2019 that is likely to grow by 7.7 per cent CAGR till 2023 while the average per capita beer consumption in India is 3.6 litres in 2019, as per statistics portal Statista.