After Facebook’s mega-investment, Indian carrier Reliance Jio raises $748M from Silver Lake

After getting a $5.7 billion investment from Facebook, Indian’s largest carrier, Reliance Jio, has raised another $748 million at a valuation of $65 billion — this time from private equity firm Silver Lake. The firm will own a 1% stake in Jio.

Jio is currently India’s biggest telecom network provider with more than 388 million subscribers.

At the time of Facebook’s deal, Jio’s enterprise value was $65.95 billion. However, Silver Lake’s deal comes at a 12.5% premium of that — $68.07 billion.

In a statement, Egon Durban, Silver Lake Co-CEO and managing partner, said the market potential addressed by Jio is enormous:

Jio Platforms is one of the world’s most remarkable companies, led by an incredibly strong and entrepreneurial management team who are driving and actualizing a courageous vision. They have brought extraordinary engineering capabilities to bear on bringing the power of low-cost digital services to a mass consumer and small business population. The market potential they are addressing is enormous, and we are honored and pleased to have been invited to partner with Mukesh Ambani and the team at Reliance and Jioto help further the Jio mission.

Silver Lake has an impressive portfolio of investments that includes Twitter, Alibaba Group, Airbnb, Alphabet’s Verily and Waymo units, and City football group (Manchester City and its sister teams in the United States, Australia, China, Japan, Spain, and Uruguay.)

In an earnings call last week, Jio’s Chairman, Mukesh Ambani said that after Facebook’s investment, several more firms are interested in investing into Reliance Jio.

While Jio’s partnership with Facebook was quite strategic with WhatsApp and JioMart, launching solutions for small businesses straightaway, Silver Lake’s investment will bring additional funds to the network provider’s coffers.