WestBridge Capital picks up $236M stake in Zscaler

WestBridge Capital Management LLC has picked up a $236 million stake in Indian billionaire Jay Chaudhry’s cloud security company, Zscaler.

This investment makes Zscaler the second-largest listed SaaS company in WestBridge's investment portfolio, according to NASDAQ disclosures.

On Tuesday, Zscaler onboarded Syam Nair, a former Salesforce executive, as its new CTO and EVP of Research and Development.

Earlier this month, the company said it is expecting to post revenues between $415 million and $419 million, much higher than its forecast of $396 million-$398 million for the third quarter of the financial year 2023. It will formally announce the results on June 1 after the market close.

Its previous public market bet of this size was Freshworks, which has been trading down almost 70% since it got listed on Nasdaq.

In the past few years, WestBridge has also made significant investments in non-listed Indian tech companies, including several SaaS and edtech firms.

For instance, in November 2022, it invested $57 million in Hyderabad-based HR tech firm Keka HR, marking the largest Series A funding round for any SaaS company in India.

In June of the same year, WestBridge Capital led a $153 million Series C funding round for a Bengaluru-based SaaS startup Leadsquared, which helped the company achieve unicorn status. Additionally, Upekkha, a SaaS accelerator, received $9 million towards its rolling fund to invest in early-stage SaaS startups.