On December 4, cross-border VC Nexus Venture Partners announced the completion of its eighth fund, with a locked-in total of $700 million, maintaining the same scale since the seventh fund in 2023. Over the next three years, half of the capital will be invested in AI infrastructure and Agent sectors, while the other half continues to bet on India's local consumer, logistics, and digital infrastructure markets.

Stick to the "small fund" strategy, raising funds every 2.5-3 years

- Managing Partner Jishnu Bhattacharjee said, "We don't raise funds just for fundraising," and the eight-member investment team believes $700 million is sufficient to cover early-stage needs from seed to Series A. The first check is usually around $1 million, with a maximum of $15 million.

- LPs include the US, Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Japan. Previous fund returns are enough for existing LPs to "roll over and reinvest," so the new fund does not need to raise large amounts externally.

AI side: Focus on developer tools and Agent infrastructure

- The US portfolio already includes Postman, Apollo, MinIO, Firecrawl, and other developer platforms. The next round will focus more on AI monitoring, data synthesis, and RLHF tools.

- Managing Partner Abhishek Sharma believes, "AI applications are being used to serve the masses," and Nexus plans to invest another 3-4 times in three specific areas: code generation, customer service agents, and edge inference chips.

India side: Consumer + Logistics + AI applications "three arrows firing together"

- Representative projects like Zepto (instant e-commerce) use AI to optimize inventory, routes, and customer service, while Neysa (local computing cloud) focuses on multilingual models and sovereign data workloads.

- Partners point out that India's large talent pool and open-source ecosystem allow localized AI applications to "skip early education" and directly implement multilingual Agents, voice interaction, and low-code platforms.

Cross-border approach: Same fund, same due diligence

- Since its establishment in 2006, it has adhered to the "single fund + cross-border integration" model. Over 18 years, it has managed $3.2 billion, invested in more than 130 companies, and achieved over 30 exits through IPOs and M&A.

- The new fund is expected to be fully invested within three years, with the ninth fund's fundraising planned to start in the first half of 2027.

Market signals: AI is overheated but India still offers value