With 75-fold return, early-stage VC firm First Cheque partially exits GIVA

Venture capital at an early stage First Cheque has partially left its portfolio company GIVA, a maker of silver and gold jewellery. A Series B round led by Premji Invest recently saw Bengaluru-based GIVA raise $33 million.

According to First Cheque, the exit occurred nearly four years after its initial investment and it received 75X of the original investment amount, giving an internal rate of return (IRR) of 194%. According to a statement from the company, First Cheque was its first institutional investor.

Although the business did not disclose the specifics of its exit, First Cheque typically invests $100,000 in new businesses; therefore, a 75-fold return would be roughly equivalent to $7.5 million. Remember that this is just an estimate, and the exact amount of the exit could vary.

With a lifetime replating service and a six-month warranty, the four-year-old GIVA offers a variety of certified and curated silver jewelry options. So far, Premji Invest, A91 Partners, India Quotient, Sixth Sense Ventures, and Aditya Birla Ventures have contributed more than $50 million in equity funding to the company.

GIVA has not yet submitted its audited financial statements for FY23, but the company anticipates an increase in revenue of more than two times that amount, to Rs 170 crore. According to TheKredible, its revenue for FY22 was Rs 84.6 crore.

Kunal Shah, an early supporter of GIVA, made a partial withdrawal shortly after the Series B round.

First Cheque was established in 2019 and has since made more than 130 investments in startups in the pre-seed and seed stages. Fashinza, WintWealth, Rigi, Rocketlane, FleetX, and GlobalFair are a few additional portfolio companies.

First Cheque also introduced its Fund II in July of last year, and it states that the second fund has supported over 30 startups in industries like B2B marketplaces, consumer internet, fintech, and SaaS. The investor has increased the size of its investment ticket in conjunction with the new fund, and now it may lead rounds up to $800K.

Many startups and late-stage companies have experienced partial exits of early backers over the past few months.  The largest investor in FirstCry, SoftBank, sold a stake to three family investment offices. With a return of more than one hundred times, Titan Capital also partially exited the debt recovery and legal automation platform Credgenics.

With a 4.2x return in less than three years, Venture Catalysts, another early-stage investment company, partially exited from the skilling platform Cusmat. Elevation Capital sold Khazanah Nasional Berhad a stake in XpressBees valued at $40 million in April.