Silver Lake is an independent American financial company that focuses on the worldwide large scale investment in technology, technology-enabled industries and related industries. Silver Lake is headquartered in Silicon Valley, and has offices in New York, London, and Hong Kong. Its portfolio of investments collectively generates more than $180 billion of revenue annually and employs 295,000 people globally. The company when making an investment abides by its 3 phase strategy that focuses on maximising wealth of their share holders they operate through primary businesses all focused on technology investment.

 •Silver lake Partners focuses on private equity investment in tech based firms 

•Silver lake Alpine provides structured equity and debt investments in technological companies 

•Silver Lake Waterman provides for growth capital through a proprietary growth debts product.

The firm’s core investment thesis is that the technology industries represent an extraordinary yet under-exploited target for large-scale private investments. Their portfolio consist of investments in many reputed companies such as Airbnb, Alibaba group, AMC, Ant Financial, byju’s etc. 

This global private equity biggie made its first play in India in 2013 by investing in Bangalore-based Eka Software Solutions, a firm that creates software for commodity trading. 

What calls itself silver is shining no less than diamond, with being a pioneer in technological investments and having  more than 60 billion under combined asset management this company, some of the major achievements of this emerging giants are :

1. It’s portfolio of investments collectively generates revenues of more than $204 billion annually.

2. Its portfolio includes Twitter, AirBnb, Alibaba Group, Ant Financial, Didi Chuxing, Motorola Solutions and City Football Group.

3. It sold Skype to Microsoft for $8.5 bn in 2011 in one of the most successful private equity exits in history

From some time, it seems that Silver Lake has turned it’s eyes towards India as it has been making quite bold bets on Indian businesses.

Silver Lake made its debut investment in India in 2013 when it picked up a minority stake in Bengaluru-based Ekta Software, which builds software for commodity trading.  

In 2020, Silver Lake has committed $2.85 billion in India in just over three months, highlighting the company’s appetite to write large cheques. Key among those were a $1 billion investment in the retail arm of Reliance Industries Ltd and leading a $500 million investment round in Byju’s, which vaulted the ed-tech unicorn’s overall valuation to $10.8 billion.

 Silver Lake was amongst the companies that got their lucky pie of share in RIL’s Jio Platform with a huge investment of $1.35 billion for a 2.08% stake. 

This rapid dealmaking has put it on a par with Japan’s SoftBank and US-based Tiger Global Management & DST Global, who have poured billions into the country since 2014, backing multiple startups as India emerged as the hottest investment market in the world.

However, Despite its major investments Silver Lake does not have a dedicated team in India and is still to set up local operations, which, according to industry participants, may happen with time.