(Adds dropped word 'million' in final paragraph)
NEW DELHI, Nov 19 (Reuters) - India's Reliance Industries Ltd RELI.NS on Thursday said its retail arm had completed its fundraising exercise as more than half a dozen investors poured 472.65 billion rupees ($6.37 billion) into a 10.09% stake in the company in two months.
Reliance Retail Ventures Ltd (RRVL) began raising capital in September, with U.S.-based private equity firm Silver Lake Partners pumping 75 billion rupees for 1.6% of the venture.
The eight other investors in RRVL include Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, private equity firm KKR & Co Inc KKR.N , Abu Dhabi state fund Mubadala Investment Co and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.
The funds will help Reliance, India's biggest retailer with roughly 12,000 stores, to aggressively expand its so-called new commerce venture, which ties neighbourhood stores to Reliance for online deliveries of groceries, apparel and electronics in a space currently dominated by Walmart (NYSE:WMT) Inc' s WMT.N Flipkart and Amazon.com Inc's AMZN.O Indian arm.
"With our focus on New Commerce, we are committed to playing a transformational role in the Indian retail sector by empowering millions of merchants and micro, small and medium enterprises," RRVL director Isha Mukesh Ambani said in a statement.
Isha is the daughter of Asia's richest man and Reliance's chairman, Mukesh Ambani.
Mumbai-headquartered Reliance in August announced it would buy retail, logistics and other assets from Future Group for $3.4 billion including debt.
Amazon has challenged that deal, alleging Future breached certain contract provisions it entered into last year in a separate deal with the U.S. e-commerce giant. an oil-to-retail conglomerate, earlier this year raised just over $20 billion from global investors, including Facebook Inc FB.O , by selling stakes in its Jio Platforms digital business.
Telecoms venture Jio, the mainstay of Jio Platforms, is India's biggest telecoms company with more than 402 million subscribers at end-August.
($1 = 74.1970 Indian rupees)