Deal action picking up in Fintech & SaaS spaces: Raja Lahiri, Grant Thornton Bharat

Deal activity in the third quarter of FY23 (Q3CY23) has been largely led by start-ups, e-commerce, and IT & ITeS sectors, per Grant Thornton Bharat. These sectors accounted for 64% of total deals and 63% in terms of deal value.

This year has been slow in deal making and the July-Sep period has seen deal flow worth $13.4 billion from around 300 deals.

Speaking to CNBC-TV18, Raja Lahiri, Partner at Grant Thornton Bharat said, “Sectors that we are seeing at least I view to watch out for is the FinTech space."

He pointed out that in private equity-backed consolidation, thre has already been an interesting deal in Rapyd- PayU, a transaction worth $600 million. Another big deal was Kedaara Capital investing a significant amount of money in a SaaS FinTech business.

"So watch out for FinTech and Saas, is the trend that I am picking up,” he noted.

He also sees the PE exit-driven IPO pipeline to be strong and the buyout trend by the private equity firms to continue.

He said, “Overall IPO market 31 IPOs so far, $3.2 billion of capital raise, and we just kind of seeing the shoots of a rising trend in the IPOs. So I would definitely see that we talked about the exits from the private equity side.

He expects good-funded companies to hit the market with a full lineup of IPOs waiting in the next quarter.

There is also a pick-up in cross-border transactions, besides US firms, Japanese firms are eyeing renewable and road assets in India, he said.

Lahiri said that overall there is a dip in the deal values. He said, “Q3 which is July, August, September, we saw $13.5 billion of deals. If you look at the entire nine months of this year, we saw $36 billion of deals, but overall a couple of things one is we have seen a dip of around 68% in terms of value terms, close to 40% in terms of volume.”