MayField Fund has announced a $110 million fund to invest in India. This is their first India focused fund and will invest in mid market companies in technology, consumer and infrastructure sectors.
They have already invested in 6 Indian companies: Tejas Networks, Paymate, Consim Info, Genesis Colors, Geodesic and Servomax.
Accel India, formed from the recent acquisition of Erasmic India, has closed a $60 million round to invest in seed and early stage companies. The company plans to invest in 25- 30 early stage companies over the next 3-4 years. Typically, they’d invest $200K – $500K and stay invested for 5 years.
This is a great thing for Indian startups. Very few Indian VC’s do early stage or seed funding.
via BS
Morpheus Venture Partners (MVP) has announced their 2 batch of portfolio companies:
1) CallGraph: Call Graph is a service to record, track, monitor, share and transcribe your calls. It is designed for distributed teams who use services such as Skype for their meetings, conference calls etc 2
2) Crederity: Crederity is a new service that applies sophisticated technologies and programs to helping people and businesses easily establish trust on the Internet. As the web’s first guaranteed trust builder, Crederity enables people and businesses to certify their own integrity and that of others.
3) DeskAway: DeskAway “simplifies teamwork”. DeskAway is a subscription-based online team and project collaboration service that enables small businesses & teams to organize, manage & track their work online.
4) Dhanax: dhanaX stands for exchange of dhana or wealth, works with the vision to connect people from different economic backgrounds and thus create wealth for them. dhanaX is an online/offline people-to-people lending platform that lets Indians to lend and borrow money from fellow Indians.
Accel Partners has teamed up with Erasmic Venture Fund, an early stage venture financing firm, to launch Accel India Venture Fund. The fund will be managed by the current partners of Erasmic Venture Fund. Erasmic’s portfolio includes HolidayIQ, Kaati Zone, Myntra, Chakpak etc.
Accel Partners has invested in BitTorrent, BrightCove, comScore, Facebook, Glam Media and several such companies.
Accel India Venture Fund will focus on early stage investing and delivering hands on strategic and operational guidance to entrepreneurs.
Congrats to the Erasmic team on the successful transition.
WATBlog reported yesterday that Sameer Guglani and Nandini Hirianniah, founders of DVD rental company Madhouse.in (acquired by Seventymm), are starting a YCombinator like incubator called Morpheus Venture Partners, to assist other early stage startups.
Ashish has a good QnA with them about their latest venture.
At this point, it looks like the incubator will be more targeted towards mentoring, strategy and advise for startups as opposed to seed funding the startups.
Our primary value add to the startup teams is the advise, mentorship, guidance, access to the right network, creating opportunity to meeting relevant people, team strategy, product strategy, launch strategy, fund raising strategy (intros and more), getting the right advisers onboard with the right kind of terms, etc.
In the current scenario, there is definitely a lot of need for such an entity. Someone, who can closely work with other entrepreneurs and help them get off the ground and get the ball rolling.
At the same time, I cant help but reminisce about a similar effort called DreamzHunt, that was launched in early 2007 by a Chennai based business group called SGS. The idea was to launch a competition where the top 3 teams will be selected and receive a funding of $20k – $100k for 15% stake in the company. The effort fizzled out and it seems that only 2 teams were selected out of all the applicants. Thus far, I havent seen any update on how those two teams are doing. Or if SGS ever invested the quoted amounts in the ventures. If you have any updates about DreamzHunt, leave a comment below and let me know.
However, based on Sameer and Nandini’s entrepreneurial success, I’m more optimistic and wish them the best with this new venture.
Nikhil has an update from TravelGuru CEO Ashwin Damera that ongoing rumors of Expedia acquiring majority stake in TravelGuru for $17 million are mere speculation and that no deal has been signed.
Just like everyone else reported, a $17 million for a majority stake would be just like a desperate deal. Something seemed very odd about the numbers.
Inventus Capital Partners are planning to invest $1 – 10 million in 15-20 early stage, technology focused companies in India. Investors include Kanwal Rekhi, John Dougery based in Bay Area while Samir Kumar and Parag Dhol will be based out of Bangalore.
via release
Avnish Bajaj, co-founder and MD, Matrix partners India, has an interesting interview in Outlook Business. A few interesting excerpts from the interview:
Q: What did the successful guys (Internet companies) get right?
A: Well to begin with, focus. If you just go through the players and see who has done extremely well versus those who have not, you’ll see the difference. The ones who stuck to what they did best and didn’t try to do too many at that time, have worked.
Q: What are you seeing as other promising emerging businesses?
A: One would be online real estate classifieds sites.The other one which will emerge is, and we have also invested in that segment, local classifieds.The other opportunity where something has to work is the consumer side of the auto sector.
Q: As investor, what areas specifically are you actively looking at?
I think the Internet is finally beginning to take off in India. It starts with access and we’ve seen massive broadband rollouts in the last few years. Once access is in place, applications follow. We are actively looking for good gaming type of companies. I actually believe there is some opportunity still in financial products. Overall, if we believe that a product or service has even a 50% chance of succeeding, we’ll look at it.
So, if you’re an entrepreneur with an idea related to gaming and looking to raise funds, you know whom to contact first 
.
Venture capital funding in India for the first quarter dropped by 27% as compared to the 4th quarter. Overall, $99 million was invested across 16 deals while the median investment size was $4.1 million. As compared to this, $135 million was invested in the fourth quarter across 17 deals.
As per the report, VC activity is steady and the drop merely reflects deals of smaller size. 67% of all VC investment ($67 million) went to seven consumer – business services companies.
ClearTrip’s $26 million round was the largest deal.
via release
Josh@RRW has profiled an interesting startup called Prototype Invest. The company is a unique kind of early stage investment firm.
Instead of providing capital in exchange for equity, the company provides programming and design skills to interested entrepreneurs. This would be particularly helpful to build a prototype for entrepreneurs who, have the idea but dont necessarily have have the needed technical-programming skills. “Think of us as a Venture Capital firm providing software, web applications and guidance, instead of money”, is how they describe themselves. In return, they take a small equity stake in the company.
The idea is pretty unique in terms of what one would expect from a investment firm. Whether the concept is successful and the idea is disruptive – we’ll have to wait and see.
What do you think – would such a model work ?
