The Venture Intelligence Blog

From the Press Release: Ahmedabad-based Intas Pharma, one of India’s leading private pharmaceutical companies, today announced that it is raising Rs. 300 crores from ChrysCapital in a pre-IPO round.   The Company has deferred its listing plans for the time being and intends to re-file for an IPO once market conditions stabilize. Intas is an established global pharmaceutical player with FY 2012 revenues of over Rs. 2,700 crores.   The Company has a strong presence in chronic therapy areas and is currently ranked 12 th in the domestic market by ORG-IMS.   Intas also has a fast growing and significant export base in Europe and USA under the brand name of Accord Healthcare. This will be ChrysCapital ’s second investment in Intas, having originally backed the Company in 2006 from an older fund.   As an existing investor in the Company, ChrysCapital has benefited significantly from the strong performance recorded by Intas over the past six years.   Consequently

From the Press Release:   TalentSprint, a pioneer in creating high performance professionals for the IT and BFSI industry, has raised INR 20 Crores in Series A equity funding from Nexus Venture Partners. As part of this Series A investment Anup Gupta will join the company’s board of directors. Co-founded by industry veterans Madhumurty Ronanki, Santanu Paul, and J.A. Chowdary, TalentSprint aims to skill 500,000 graduates by 2020. TalentSprint, an NSDC partner company, offers employability programs to young professionals using experiential learning and iPEARL, its proprietary technology platform. The programs blend diverse skills and are delivered by b est-of-class, industry practitioners to students during or after college, thereby greatly improving their prospects of getting employed when they graduate. On the demand side, the company works closely with industry partners to deliver productivity and efficiency gains in excess of 70% in terms of new talent acquisition.

From a TiE Mumbai SmashUp e-poster: We've heard of "McKinsey Mafia", "IIM-A Mafia", etc. being used to refer to the sheer number of alum of these hallowed institutions that go on to join the Indian PE/VC industry. But what explains the high odds of raising dollops of venture capital funding for your e-commerce venture if your second name is a Bansal? Company No. of Co-founding Bansals VC Raised (US$ M) Flipkart 2 180 Snapdeal 1 50 Myntra 1 40 Lenskart 1 4 Total 5 $275 M * Source: Publicly reported data - including especially this Mint report for the last $150-M round raised by Flipkart Please do let us know if we should modify the above table in light of any new data - either on the number of Bansal companies or the value of the investments. While the above is not t

From the Press Release: Unmetric, a Chicago, USA-headquartered firm with offices in Chennai & Coimbatore in India, has raised $3.2 million in Series A financing led by Nexus Venture Partners. Unmetric will use the funds to continue developing its benchmarking platform, enabling companies to better survey and analyze the content strategy of a brand and the key terms that are triggering customer engagement. Unmetric will also be using the round to further expand its team in the U.S. “Brands around the world today are witnessing an explosion in opportunities to reach customers through social media,” said Jishnu Bhattacharjee from Nexus Venture Partners. “We’ve seen many social media monitoring and listening tools, but what impressed us most about Unmetric is that its technology platform uniquely mines the much-needed benchmarks from the deluge of social media data to provide firms with actionable insights on how they are performing against their competitors.” Using a combination of ad

From the Press Release: Pragati India Fund today announced its maiden investment in Indore-based Jash Engineering Limited, a leader in the manufacture of customized engineering goods for water and waste water infrastructure sector. Jash Engineering is a leading manufacturer of customized equipment across the value chain in the water and waste water management industries. Founded in 1972, the company has market leading positions in its product categories of gates, screens, valves and is now expanding into manufacturing of process equipment for treatment plants, Archimedean screw pumps and generation of clean power from residual water of water treatment plants using Hydropower screw generator technology. Jash’s products are widely used across India’s largest municipalities which are increasingly focused on the urgent requirement to augment water and waste water treatment capacities. In the corporate sector, Jash’s products are used for liquid and bulk solid waste handling in cement, pap

Partner Event Press Release: - IVCA celebrates 10 years of Private Equity and Venture Capital in India - Upbeat promoters to discuss the contribution of Private Equity and Venture Capital business to the economic growth of the country - Investments through PE continue to grow at double digit: Over Rs. 2,50,000 crores invested in the country in the last 10 years New Delhi, April 5, 2012: Indian Private Equity & Venture Capital Association (IVCA), a unified and influential voice of private equity and venture capital, is organising - IVCA Conclave 2012 . The first such industry conclave is organized to showcase the contribution of Private Equity and Venture Capital to the economic growth of the country. The conclave with a theme of “Celebrating the 10 years of PE VC”, will project the positive contribution of the industry in fostering innovation and entrepreneurship at the mega conclave scheduled on April 19th at The Leela Palace, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi. “Aptly themed, the conclave

Edited excerpts from the Press Release: TA Associates, a leading global growth private equity firm, today announced it has acquired a minority stake in BillDesk,India’s largest online payment services company. Dhiraj Poddar, Director, TA Associates Advisory Pvt. Ltd., will join the company’s Board of Directors. Founded in 2000, BillDesk partners with multiple banks, card issuers, service providers and merchants in providing electronic bill presentment and payment and online payment services in India. Today, BillDesk’s network is used by over 50 of India’s largest banks and by large merchants across diverse industry segments, including utilities, telecom, insurance, mutual funds, travel and e-commerce. “While India is today dominated by paper-based transactions, electronic transactions are quickly gaining favor,” said Naveen Wadhera, Director, TA Associates Advisory Pvt. Ltd.,“There is growing acceptance of online payments by retail consumers, for products and services procured both onl

Secondary transactions rise as global PE firms buy out stakes of earlier investors Private Equity firms invested about $1,886 million across 90 deals during the quarter ended March 2012, according to a study by Venture Intelligence . The investment amount was almost half that was invested in the same period last year ($3,614 million across 107 transactions). The immediate previous quarter had witnessed $1,470 million being invested across 120 transactions. There were six reported PE investments worth over $100 million (and none above $200 million) during Q1’12 compared to 9 such transactions in the same period last year (which included 5 transactions over $200 million). Three of the $100 million+ investments in Q1’12 went into the hospitals & clinics sector: $110 million into Care Hospitals (by Advent International) and $100 million each into DM Healthcare and Vasan Healthcare (by Olympus Capital and by the Singapore Government-owned GIC respectively) reinforcing the year-end Ventu