WestBridge Capital

DEAD-tier fundraise contact. Closed on a stage mismatch — WestBridge is growth-stage, init.inc is pre-seed/seed. Profile intentionally light. See Fundraise Relationship.

⚠️ Disambiguation: This is WestBridge Capital, the $7B+ India/US growth & crossover fund (KP Balaraj, Sumir Chadha, Sandeep Singhal; offices in Silicon Valley / Bangalore / Mauritius). It carries the lineage that was once Sequoia Capital India (the team rebranded back to WestBridge in 2011). Not to be confused with seed-stage namesakes (“WestBridge” / “Westbridge” used by other small funds).

Firm Profile

• Founded: 2000 by KP Balaraj, Sumir Chadha, SK Jain, Sandeep Singhal. (the-captable.com)
• AUM: $7B+. (westbridgecap.com; the-captable.com)
• HQ / offices: Mauritius (domicile) · San Mateo, CA (400 S El Camino Real) · Bangalore.
• Structure: Evergreen + crossover — invests across both private and public markets, holds for the long term, often the company’s largest institutional partner; raised $1.5B in a single commitment for Indian companies (its largest ever). (PE Insights)
• Stage focus: Series A → public — i.e. growth/late-stage, not seed. This is the disqualifier for init.inc.
• Geography/thesis: India–US “nexus” companies; ~150+ investments over 25 years (Meesho, PhysicsWallah, IndiGo, Spinny, Info Edge/Naukri, Innovaccer Series B, Freshworks, Star Health). ^[single-source — portfolio list from Exa/WebSearch records]

Partners

• Sumir Chadha — Founder & Managing Director.
• Sandeep Singhal — Co-founder & Managing Director (Meesho, PhysicsWallah, IndiGo, Spinny, Info Edge).
• KP Balaraj — Co-founder & Managing Director.
• No partner stub created — CRM surfaced no individual POC (intro was firm-level via Niam and never advanced).

Recent pre-seed/seed activity (Pass-1 sketch — ≤5 deals)

Full data → /Users/sazzad14/seed-market-scan/firms/westbridge-capital.csv. Caveat: WestBridge does very little seed/pre-seed — its entry point is Series A and up. The CSV will mostly show growth-stage rounds (the closest-to-early they get), which is itself the evidence for the stage-mismatch verdict.

Best data channels for this firm

Indian tech press is far richer than US for WestBridge: The CapTable, Entrackr, Inc42, Moneycontrol, PE Insights for fund/round detail; Crunchbase/CB Insights for the US-side portfolio. The firm site lists thesis but few round specifics. US aggregators (Codex/Exa) skew toward the SF-listed deals and undercount the India book. For init.inc’s purposes the only data point that matters is the stage signature, which all sources agree on.

Fundraise Relationship (init.inc)

• Status: DEAD — structural stage mismatch. No ask was made. WestBridge writes Series A → public-market checks; init.inc is raising pre-seed/seed. Not a thesis pass, not a conflict — too late-stage to be relevant to this round. (Same disqualifier class as Greenoaks and Friends & Family Capital elsewhere in the pipeline.)
• Conversation log (newest first):
  • 2026-04-28 — CLOSED / LOST. Niam confirmed WestBridge is growth-stage, “not worth talking to at our stage.” No meeting, no POC, no outreach sent. Killed at the qualification step.
• Mutual connections / warm path: Niam was the connector; he self-disqualified the firm on stage.
• Competitor-conflict flag: None found. WestBridge does not appear on any init.inc competitor cap table (see cap-table-patterns-across-startup-competitors). Clean — but moot.
• Live stage: Lost (CRM, closed 2026-04-28).

Cross-check vs existing wiki

No prior WestBridge mention in the competitor synthesis — nothing to reconcile. This page resolves previously-broken [[entities/westbridge-capital]] wikilinks. (Worth noting for future researchers: do not conflate WestBridge with its Sequoia-India ancestry when checking competitor cap tables — Sequoia Capital is separately tracked as hard-conflicted via Serval + Edra.)

Related

• cap-table-patterns-across-startup-competitors
• Init Intelligence

Pass 2 deal pattern (2026-05-25)

Seed lead-rate: ZERO in the 18-24mo window. Two independent sweeps (Exa + WebSearch) surfaced no seed/pre-seed rounds — the earliest stage WestBridge entered is Series A (Finfactor $15MDec2025,SeriesAlead,fintech/India).ModeisSeriesB\to public:\ast \ast Yoodli$40M Series B (Dec 2025, WestBridge-led; Manthan Shah, Principal)**, Varaha $20MSeriesB(Feb2026,WestBridge-led—debutclimatebet)\ast \ast ,\ast \ast Juspay$50M Series D (Jan 2026, participant). Typical “early” check from WestBridge is $15-40MatSeriesA/B;consistentacrossgeographies(US+India).\ast \ast Disambiguationre-confirmed:\ast \ast thisistheKPBalaraj/SumirChadha/SandeepSinghal$7B India-US growth/crossover fund (ex-Sequoia Capital India lineage), NOT a seed-stage namesake — the company-write-up framing of “seed-stage” is wrong if encountered. Best data channel: Indian tech press (The CapTable, Entrackr, VCCircle, LiveMint) for the India book + GeekWire/EINPresswire for US-side rounds; firm site lists thesis but few specifics; LeadIQ has clean per-round entries. Cap-table-clean re-confirmed: zero init.inc-competitor exposure. Stage-mismatch DEAD status from Pass 1 stands — WestBridge’s earliest entry stage is Series A, above init.inc’s pre-seed/seed round.