The Venture Intelligence Blog

Smart CEO has profile on this company which focuses on making youth from Tier II and III cities more employment ready. After three years of research, the Graduate Certificate in Corporate Readiness (GCCR) is a copyrighted program from TalentBridge to help students from smaller towns prepare for interviews and a corporate career. ...The company conducted an online survey, which showed that 77 per cent of the time corporates are looking for the right attitude in students, 13 per cent for communication skills, six per cent on subject knowledge and four per cent on other specific needs. The first typical question hiring managers ask candidates is, “Tell me about yourself.” ...The company has seven full time trainers and 50 empanelled trainers. They are all trained under a ‘Train the Trainer’ program, which is based on a video content TalentBridge has developed and used as a framework. In 2010-11, about 1,500 students were trained and its current year target is 5,300, which Shukla is confi...

NPR's Planet Money has a very interesting podcast with Satyajit Das, a finance professional-turned-author, where he talks about the imbalances created by finance (and financial engineering) driving businesses, rather than the other way round. He provides a very graphic example from his career at an airline firm - which began to make more money by making bets on the price of oil than from transporting people (and hence became more of a Financial Institution than an airline). Das also talks about how finance getting into the driver's seat has led to too many bright young minds getting into this area (because the money is better, etc.) and how, one of the benefits of the great credit crunch of 2008/09, is taking some fizz out of finance. You can listed to the podcast from here Here is the Amazon.com link to the new book ("Extreme Money") by Das on this topic and more. Venture Intelligence is the leading provider of data and analysis on private equity, venture capital a...

US-headquartered Private Equity firm Blackstone stepped on the gas on its India investments, committing to invest over half a billion dollars in just the three months ended September 2011, according to the Venture Intelligence quarterly Private Equity Roundup Reports . Overall, Private Equity firms invested about $2,249 million across 98 deals during the quarter (not including Real Estate investments). Three of Blackstone's investments during the period were targeted at companies involved in Power Projects: SKS Chhattisgarh Power Generation ($261-M via the Blackstone owned Sithe Global Power); Visa Power ($111-M) and Monnet Ispat & Power ($29-M in the listed group company of Monnet Power - in which it had invested $60-M last year). Blackstone was also involved in the largest real estate sector investment announced during Q3’11: a reported $200 million investment in Bangalore’s Manyata Embassy Business Park. The firm also wrote a small cheque (by its standards) - of about $33 mi...

Venture Capital firms invested $217 million over 43 deals in India during the three months ending September 2011, according to a study by Venture Intelligence (http://www.ventureintelligence.in), a research service focused on Private Equity, Venture Capital and M&A transaction activity in India. These figures take the total VC investments in 2011 to $752 million across 136 transactions (compared to $504 million across 97 deals in the first nine months of 2010 and $707 million across 132 transactions during the entire year). The amount invested during Q3’11 was flat compared to the same quarter in 2010 (which had witnessed $212 million being invested across 42 deals) and significantly lower compared to the immediate previous quarter ($325 million across 56 deals), the Venture Intelligence study showed. Information Technology and IT-Enabled Services (IT & ITES) companies attracted the most investments at 21 deals worth about $89 million, followed by Energy and Financial Services ...

From the Press Release: GENWI (http://genwi.com), the leader in cloud publishing platforms for Tablets and Smartphones, has raised $4 million in Series A funding in a round led by Nexus Venture Partners (http://nexusvp.com). GENWI’s existing investors,Inventus Capital Partners and Quest Venture Partners, also participated in the round, bringing GENWI’s lifetime funding to $5.1 million including their original $1.1 million seed round raised in 2010. Offering one of the easiest and yet extremely powerful cloud-based platforms for publishing content on Tablets and Smartphones, GENWI has created and is actively managing over 1,500 apps for thousands of publishers. As opposed to custom building apps for each deviceform factor, GENWI affords publishers the ability to publish once and deliver interactive apps across all smart mobile devices - including iOS, Android, and HTML5. The GENWI Cloud Publishing Suite offers a mobile optimized, content aggregation and management system,a custom interf...

PE Investments in first 9 months of 2011 surpasses entire of 2010 as deal sizes grow significantly Private Equity firms invested about $2,249 million across 98 deals during the quarter ended September 2011, according to a study by Venture Intelligence (http://www.ventureintelligence.in), a research service focused on Private Equity and M&A transaction activity in the country. The latest figures take the total PE investments in the first nine months of 2011 to about $8,570 million (across 317 transactions) – significantly higher compared to the about $6,400 million (across 270 transactions) in the same period last year. Also, the value of PE investments year-to-date in 2011 has already surpassed the $8,256 million invested (across 358 transactions) in the entire of 2010, the Venture Intelligence study showed. (Note: These figures exclude PE investments in Real Estate.) The PE investment amount during Q3’11 was lower than that during the same period last year (which witnessed $2,357 ...

Extract from an article by Haigreve Khaitan of corporate law firm Khaitan & Co. in The Economic Times. Promoters may be able to assess investors' intentions from the manner of their treatment of anti-dilution rights that keep the investors' holding at a pre-agreed level. For example, if an investor holds 100 shares issued at Rs.100 per share, and the company makes a fresh round at Rs.50 per share, the investor with full anti-dilution protection would be entitled to a further 100 shares at no additional cost. If investors do not participate at the lower-price rights issue,it may indicate that they do not have a long-term plan with your company. Promoters could negotiate provisions where the investor loses its anti-dilution protection in such circumstances. Private Equity investors negotiate expensive affirmative rights and minority protection,via board control rights often not fully used when the company's business and finances are positive. Understand comple...

Edited excerpts from the Press Release: NYSE-listed Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions to the enterprise, has agreed to acquire privately held Gluster, Inc, a leading provider of scale-out, open source storage solutions for standardizing the management of unstructured data , for approximately $136 million in cash. As part of the transaction, Red Hat will also assume unvested Gluster equity outstanding on the closing date and issue certain equity retention incentives. The transaction is expected to close in October, subject to customary closing conditions. With this acquisition, Red Hat will define a new baseline for how enterprise IT manages the explosion of big data, whether deployed on-premise or spanning into the public cloud. Red Hat is expanding into a critical part of enterprise infrastructure, enabling it to deliver open storage solutions that protect customer investments as they approach the new era of computing. Founded in 2005, Gl...