Bengaluru: A year after deploying $675 million into Indian startups, Dutch technology investor Prosus says its biggest bets are still relatively risky and far from mature businesses.
“The investments we’ve made are into growth companies that we see a lot of potential and lots of runway still left,” Ashutosh Sharma, India ecosystem- investments & M&A at Prosus told Mint.
Through 2025, the technology investor deployed $675 million in companies such as Urban Company, PayU, , Ixigo, Wiom, Deccan AI, CodeKarma and Arivihan.
While these companies have reached some size and scale, they are still risky bets. “They’re not mature businesses in that while their core offerings might be mature, they continue to add new verticals, so they’re not mature in that sense,” said Sharma.
The firm’s conviction in long-term bets comes as India’s tech ecosystem enters a more mature phase, marked by a wave of listings. Several of its portfolio companies, including Swiggy, and Urban Company, have gone public over the past two years, while others such as Captain Fresh and PayU are expected to refile IPO papers this year. With domestic consumption rising, investors across the board are betting that there is still room for disruptive companies to emerge.
For Prosus, there are no fixed exit timelines for its investments, given that it invests off balancesheet and doesn’t raise capital from other firms or individuals (i.e., limited partners). As a result, leaders at the firm have no strict mandate for the kinds of investments they should make or at what stage to invest.
AI and edtech bets
While the firm has traditionally focused on large, late-stage growth investments, it continues to see value in companies that could drastically change a sector over time. Its investments in artificial intelligence-led edtech Arivihan and AI-powered code development platform CodeKarma underscore this push.
The firm backed Arivihan, its first edtech investment since the collapse of Byju’s. “We don’t get bogged down just because one of our investments didn’t work,” Sharma said. “There’s no denying that the supply and demand gap for quality education in India is big.”
The ed-tech investment is part of the firm’s belief that consumer AI is set to bring tailwinds in India. “India has a clear right to win on consumer AI,” said Sharma. “There’s a certain amount of knowledge of local nuances, local behaviours, local buying patterns that are required to repurpose general purpose LLMs (large language model) for the Indian context.”
Prosus remains wary of enterprise technology bets in India, where startups face intense global competition and rapid technological shifts.
Last year, Prosus announced a partnership with global venture capital firm Accel to back very early-stage deeptech companies, which the two call ‘leaptech.’
The Dutch investor has made such investments before. It first invested in Tencent in 2001 when the company’s valuation stood at around $40 million. Today, the company is valued at $640-650 billion on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Recently, Prosus sold a 2% stake in the company for around $14.6 billion as part of Tencent’s share buyback programme, reducing its holdings in the company to just under 23%.
“This is a larger leap for us than those we’ve taken in the past. The reason we chose India for this is because we’ve seen the audaciousness and ambitions of entrepreneurs increase a lot,” said Sharma.
While deeptech companies are inherently long-term bets, these bets align with the firm’s thesis of staying long on its investments. To be sure, these investments have generally been geared towards payments and , food delivery, ed-tech and classifieds.
“We make a lot of non-core investments as well. Our portfolio is not like a disparate set of companies. The idea is to build an ecosystem around everything such that all of them interact with each other,” Sharma said.