Shraeyansh Thakur, an investor at Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India and SEA), is leaving the venture capital fund after nearly a decade to pursue a new entrepreneurial journey, he said in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday. Thakur is on the board of Apna Mart, Cars 24, and digital visa platform Atlys, while he is a board observer for e-commerce unicorn Meesho.
“It’s hard to have not felt the entrepreneurial energy from seeing these journeys up close. It’s been a long dream of mine to be an entrepreneur and I am excited about the journey ahead,” he wrote.
Thakur’s exit comes less than a month after Peak XV’s managing directors Shailesh Lakhani and Abheek Anand, announced their exits from the firm. Both Lakhani, who has spent more than 17 years with the firm, and Anand, who has been with the firm for 12 years, were instrumental in scaling the firm’s India operations.
Last November, the firm’s Surge partner Anandamoy Roychowdhary quit after over a decade with Peak XV and before him, former managing director Piyush Gupta had left the firm in April after spending seven years.
These departures came at a time when the venture firm announced that it was reducing the size of its $2.85 billion 2022 vintage fund by 16% or $465 million, to reorganise its investment strategy in the light of high price-to-earnings multiples of public market companies.
“In the context of a richly priced public market in India, we are investing in a measured manner in our growth fund, while we continue to lean in on seed and venture stage opportunities,” the venture firm had said in October.
The firm also reduced management fees on some of its growth and multi-stage funds. These funds now operate on a standard 2:20 model, where it charges a 2% management fee from limited partners, and a 20% share of profits or carried interest. Earlier it used to operate on a 2.5:30 model, higher than industry standards. The seed and venture funds models remain unchanged.
A year before that, in 2023, Sequoia Capital split its India, US, and China operations and renamed the India and Southeast Asia entity Peak XV Partners. The firm said the move was necessary to avoid confusion among diverging strategies of its portfolios.
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