Catamaran president Deepak Padaki sees startup valuations falling further
funding winter and an increase in the number of companies looking to raise cash, says Deepak Padaki, president of Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy’s investment firm, Catamaran Ventures. The family office has backed around 27 private firms including Acko, Udaan, PaperBoat and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. In an interview with ET’s Beena Parmar, Padaki, who joined the company last August, also talks about its investment exits, deal sizes and corporate governance at startups. Edited excerpts:
Private investments have slowed down. Where is growth coming from for Catamaran?
Elevate Your Tech Prowess with High-Value Skill Courses
Offering CollegeCourseWebsiteIIM LucknowIIML Executive Programme in FinTech, Banking & Applied Risk ManagementVisitIndian School of BusinessISB Product ManagementVisitIIM KozhikodeIIMK Senior Management ProgrammeVisitSo far, we had good returns on our public markets portfolio in 2023. And all indications are that it will continue to be healthy in 2024. Broadly, our allocation framework is one-third each in public, private and fixed-income markets. We have a 15% overall return target on our complete portfolio, and aim to double our AUM (assets under management) in five years ($2 billion by 2027).
Also read | Startups write a $1.5-billion twist in winter’s tale
What sectors look promising for investments in 2024?
In 2023, we built a thesis around investing in manufacturing in India — not so much the final equipment makers but growing the supply chain below it… We are looking at startups with intelligent manufacturing like how do you make the factory floor intelligent, some amount of robotics there, predictive analytics, maintenance, etc. We hope to see more deeptech on material science, a combination of
