Velvet, a Brazilian provider of Liquidity as a Benefit solution to startups, on June 15 said it entered Indian markets to cater to tech ventures with valuations around $300 million.
Velvet is a platform that buys stakes in promising, privately-owned startups, allowing their partners and employees to monetize part of their vested equity before the company goes public.
The company said it has set aside a corpus of $200 million to invest in India and in other markets. To start with, it would collaborate with three to four startups in the country. It has already signed a $10 million deal with Open Financial Technologies, the 100th unicorn of India.
Carlos E. Naupari, co-founder & co-CEO of Velvet said, India was a massive opportunity market for Velvet, however, the customer pipeline would be selective, curated and targetted at ‘soonicorns’.
Vivek Boray, founder of Velvet’s India office added, “We are going to focus on educating the ecosystem on our offering and how it enables scaling companies to retain talent. Our recurring liquidity programmes enable early partners of startups to tap into otherwise unavailable liquidity consistently.”
Velvet enables access for high-income investors to sell their stakes through a platform that is connected with some of the largest private banking and wealth management firms across the globe, which will sell and buy the stakes on behalf of their clients, the company claimed.
