The Venture Intelligence Blog

"Offshoring can rescue the US software industry"

One of the key problems facing US software companies is lack of innovation, according to George Gilbert and Rahul Sood, principals at Tech Strategy Partners. Innovation is being "strangled" due to insufficient R&D budgets on the company side and an overspending hangover on the customer side, they say in a recent CNET News.com. "Offshore development can help on both fronts," they claim.

The authors point out that as software companies mature, innovation tapers off and grunt work multiplies. By leaving the grunt work--"work that lends itself to a standardized development process" in more politically correct language--to offshore companies, US developers can focus on more creative and innovative programing. "American developers have a passion for innovation. They are more interested in pushing the state of the art in design and functionality," the authors say.

The authors argue that using offshore labor will help US software companies improve the quality of their software. "US companies are forced to compromise on quality to meet deadlines and to focus on more creative tasks. The result is a surge of post-release bugs discovered by customers. Offshore companies, who have grown up testing other people's code, have invested in more advanced testing methodologies than most US companies," they say.

Click Here to read the full column.

EY Tops League Table for Transaction Advisors to M&A deals in 24

Moelis & Company & PwC claim the No.2 & No.3 slots Ernst & Young (EY) topped the Venture Intelligence League Table for Transaction Advisor to M&A Deals during 2024, advising 34 deals worth $4.1 Billion. Moelis & Company stood second advising 2 deals worth $3.9 billion. PwC followed with 18 deals worth $3.3 billion. Citi ($2.5 billion across 1 deal) and Advay Capital ($2.3 billion across 1 deal) completed the top five. Among the largest M&A deals in 2024, Citi advised $2.5 Billion acquisition of the Indian business of American Tower Corporation by Brookfield , Advay Capital and Moelis & Company advised the $2.3 Billion acquisition of Care Hospitals by Aster DM Healthcare . Jefferies & Co., JP Morgan and Moelis & Company advised the $1.6 Billion acquisition of Bharat Serums & Vaccines by Mankind Pharma. Among the other notable M&A deals in Q4 2024, EY advised the $685 million acquisition of ITD Cementation ...

Morgan Stanley tops League Table for Transaction Advisors to M&A deals in 2020

Morgan Stanley , which advised the $10.1 Billion strategic investment by Facebook and Google into Reliance Industries' telecom arm Jio platforms (among other Private Equity investments in the company), topped the Venture Intelligence League Table for Transaction Advisor to M&A Deals for 2020. Ambit Corporate Finance - which advised 3 deals worth $4.0 Billion, including Brookfield's $3.7 Billion acquisition of Reliance Tower Infrastructure Trust - took the second spot. JM Financial ($3.7 Billion across 5 deals), Metta Capital ($3.4 Billion across 3 deals) and ICICI Securities ($3.4 Billion across 2 deals) - all of whom (along with Citi) are advisors to the $3.4 Billion acquisition of Future Group's retail related ventures by Reliance Retail, announced in August - completed the top five. The Venture Intelligence League Tables , the first such initiative exclusively tracking transactions involving India-based companies, are based on the value of PE and M&A tra...

Everything you wanted to know (and some things you didn't care to know) about ChrysCapital's Ashish Dhawan

New Delhi-based private equity fund ChrysCapital is vastly different from its former avatar, Chrysalis Capital. While Chrysalis began life (in Mumbai) as an venture capital firm focussed on start-up investments, today's ChrysCapital is best know for its late-stage investments (often in already public companies). The fascinating part of this transformation is that one of the fund's original partners - Senior Managing Director Ashish Dhawan - has been firmly in the driver's seat throughout the process. It's a story that needed to be told. As a cover story. Kudos to Business Today for telling it first. Thankfully, unlike the glowing profiles that BT is famous for - including the one featuring infamous stock brocker Harshad Mehta with his Lexus on the cover - this one has a lot of facts. Some well known. And others less so. That ChrysCapital's first fund would have been a disaster but for the pioneering investment in Raman Roy founded BPO firm Spectramind i...

Why did Sony Entertainment Television's CEO quit?

Businessworld has a cover story on the corporate battle that resulted in Kunal Dasgupta, the CEO of Multi Screen Media (formerly Sony Entertainment Television), quitting just a few months before his contract was due to end. Dasgupta’s abrupt exit was the culmination of six years of tension between majority shareholder Sony Pictures Television International (SPTI) that owns 61 per cent of MSM, on one hand, and Atlas Equifinn on the other, which is a consortium of Indian shareholders (Singapore-based Rakesh Aggarwal, World Media Group director Sudesh Iyer, Shemaroo Entertainment Managing Director Raman Maroo, MobiApps Holding’s Jayesh Parekh, B.R. Sule, Sushil Shergil and actor Jackie Shroff ) holding 32 per cent. Capital Japan and some financial institutions own the rest 7 per cent. And of course, the third protagonist is Dasgupta, who walked a tightrope and managed to keep his job for over 14 years despite the fact that neither group of shareholders was too happy with him. Very little...

VC Interview: Shailendra Singh of Sequoia Capital India

In a recent interview to Venture Intelligence, Shailendra Singh discussed some of the firm’s newer investments in the early stage segment including in the online payments space, the progress at a few existing portfolio companies and the active role the firm is playing in helping its portfolio companies scale and succeed in India and globally. Prior to joining the firm in 2006, Singh was a strategy consultant at Bain & Company in New York and before that, an entrepreneur in the digital media industry. Venture Intelligence: How does Sequoia go about identifying potential early stage investments in India? Is there anything different you are doing today than, say, a couple of years back? Shailendra Singh: There is a lot more focus on technology investing and early stage investing. In general, as you might remember a few years ago, we were doing primarily growth investing but in the past 18-odd months, we have had a very strong focus on early stage and that’s continuing. In terms...