The Venture Intelligence Blog

Indian Angel Network (IAN) is to make an investment in UK start-up SwiftShift, a provider of software solutions. London-based SwiftShift has developed a software solution that allows companies to quickly fill short-notice shifts using their own staff through SMS, e-mail and mobile technology.  Source: Economic Times    Venture Intelligence is the leading provider of data and analysis on Private Company Financials, Transactions (private equity, venture capital and M&A) & their Valuations in India. Click Here to view our products list including the Free Deal Digest Weekly: India's First & Most Exhaustive Transactions Newsletter.

Helion Venture Partners and Accel Partners have invested in Bangalore-based e-commerce search firm Zettata . Founded by Srinivasan Seshadri and Vikram Srinivasan, two former academics who had also worked at Bell Labs. Source: Economic Times Venture Intelligence is the leading provider of data and analysis on Private Company Financials, Transactions (private equity, venture capital and M&A) & their Valuations in India. Click Here to view our products list including the Free Deal Digest Weekly: India's First & Most Exhaustive Transactions Newsletter.

Former Indiagames founder Vishal Gondal’s new wearable tecg venture GOQii has raised several million dollars from angel investors including Google Senior Vice President Amit Singhal, Flextronics CEO Mike McNamara, EDventure’s Esther Dyson, Bollywood actress Madhuri Dixit-Nene, Seagate CEO Steve Luczo, and Sanjay Parthasarthy of Indix.  GOQii’s wristband has a bevy of slick features, including a full touch display, a vibrating alarm, ultra-lightweight water resistant construction with skin sensitive materials, and automatic wireless syncing via bluetooth. The band functions include a watch, a motion sensor which can track steps, calories, distance and active time among others.  Source: Yourstory   Venture Intelligence is the leading provider of data and analysis on Private Company Financials, Transactions (private equity, venture capital and M&A) & their Valuations in India. Click Here to view our products list including the Free Deal Digest Week...

Mumbai-based impact investment fund, Ankur Capital, has invested in three early-stage ventures that focus on rural markets. The three firms are: CropIn, a cloud-based farm management systems company, home compost solutions provider Daily Dump and primary eye-care service provider ERC. The start-ups have issued convertible debt to the fund, which will invest about Rs. 50 lakh in each company for a 30% stake. Ankur Capital has a corpus of Rs. 40 crore. Ankur Capital’s first fund will look to make 20 investments, with an average investment period of five years. For follow-on rounds of funding, the fund will invest between Rs. 2 crore and Rs. 4 crore in each investee company while aiming for gross return on investments of about 15%.  Source: Economic Times   Venture Intelligence is the leading provider of data and analysis on Private Company Financials, Transactions (private equity, venture capital and M&A) & their Valuations in India. Click Here to view ...

HackerEarth , a start-up which helps multinational companies hire programmers, has raised Rs 3.1 crore seed funding from Angel Prime as it prepares to expand operations in India and overseas markets. Existing investor GSF, an accelerator, also participated. The firm will use the funds to ramp up operations in India and start making inroads in markets such as Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and United States in the next one year.  Source: Economic Times    Venture Intelligence is the leading provider of data and analysis on Private Company Financials, Transactions (private equity, venture capital and M&A) & their Valuations in India. Click Here to view our products list including the Free Deal Digest Weekly: India's First & Most Exhaustive Transactions Newsletter.

Cross Posted from the Entrevista blog . Interview with Raj Nair, Founder-Chairman of Avalon Consulting , the Mumbai-headquartered, international consulting firm and also research and analytics firm Ugam Solutions and artificial intelligence software firm . Interview begins with how Ugam Solutions' founding & funding - especially how the company "pivoted" to completely new business in 50 days flat! The interviewer is fellow entrepreneur Chandu Nair . Chandu earlier founded, successfully raised venture capital for and exited from Scope eKnowledge, one of the earliest KPO firms in India. The Audio (podcast) version can be downloaded from here   Highlights: Striking balance between Flexibility & Measurement in the Early Years: In the initial years of starting up,  it’s important to have the flexibility to course correct and not put pressure on the business with a rigid business model, ambitious target, etc. “There is (however) a difference between cha...

Singapore-based investor LionRock Capital, besides Industrialist Adi Godrej's younger daughter Nisa, Skype co-founder Toivo Annus and Diapers.com co-founder and CTO Wei Yan, have invested $2 million in Hopscotch, a Mumbai-based boutique e-commerce startup selling products for infants and kids. The funds will be deployed to boost marketing and technology.  The 15-month-old Hopscotch, co-founded by two former Diapers.com executives Rahul Anand and Lisa Kennedy, sells curated hard-to-find merchandise using a flash sales model. It hopes to report sales of $4 million in the current fiscal selling apparel, toys, shoes and skincare products. Anand and co-founder Kennedy turned their attention to India two years ago, after Diapers.com was acquired by Amazon for $550 million in 2011.  Source: Times of India   Venture Intelligence is the leading provider of data and analysis on Private Company Financials, Transactions (private equity, venture capital and M&A) ...

A huge pall of uncertainty surrounds the future of Growth Capital investing in India. Is the segment, that represents the bulk of both the supply and demand for private equity capital in India, (gulp) dead ? If yes, who killed it? Who killed Growth Capital in India? Venture Intelligence is the leading provider of data and analysis on Private Company Financials, Transactions (private equity, venture capital and M&A) & their Valuations in India. Click Here to view our products list including the Free Deal Digest Weekly: India's First & Most Exhaustive Transactions Newsletter.

From the Economic Times article : Two deals lifted their fortunes. The first: advising Dr Reddy's to purchase Group Pharma, a smaller drug firm, for Rs 25 crore, which fetched them their first cheque, of Rs 50 lakh. "It was our initial capital," says Ramprasad. In their second deal, closed in just three weeks, they helped Abhishek Dalmia purchase Revathi CP, a manufacturer of drilling tools that was being advised by DSP. In December 2001, small on capital but big on confidence, Mape— an acronym for mergers, acquisitions and private equity—was formally born in a 3BHK flat in Bangalore owned by Mathew. "In hindsight, we were foolish enough not to realise the enormity of the task,'' says Mathew. ''We were super confident and lucky." In time, Mape bagged business from both mid-sized and larger companies, even though its fee was the same as global banks. It attracted talent. In 2005, Ajay Garg, a former colleague at DSP, joined Mape as thje ...

Gray Matters India Pvt.Ltd (GMI), an organization that has been incubated and co-funded by Atlanta-based Gray Matters Capital(GMC), announced today an INR 45 million equity investment from Michael & Susan Dell Foundation , a philanthropicorganization focused on improving the lives of impoverished children in the United States, South Africa and India. GMI focuses onimproving the quality of education in schools through assessments, and educational analytics, and their rating tool provides high quality and relevant learning level assessments by leveraging strong partnerships with organizations like ACER, the leading Australian assessment agency. “We are excited about this support from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation to help us increase the role of assessments and analytics in K12 education and to help improve educational quality by making data actionable to schools. The confidence shown by the Dell family foundation, which believes in measuring educational quality throug...

"VCs look for Startups going after a Big Market with a Passionate Team and have an 'unfair advantage'." vs "A startup is an organization built to search for a repeatable and scalable business model." If the organization does not yet have a viable business model, how can it have an "unfair advantage"? "VCs take pure equity risk and, as long as the business pans out fine, their interests are perfectly aligned with that of the entrepreneurs." vs "VCs bury 'Dangerous Bombs in Share Holders Agreements' and unless you 'diffuse them', they will take away all the spoils." Conundrums? Myths? Certainly Quite Puzzling Questions to an Entrepreneur Seeking the First Round of VC funding.   But, who's going to provide the answers?   I wish my Grandma was around to help.   Grandma?   I've come to realize that...

Private Equity AZB & Partners has retained its status – for the fourth consecutive year - as the Most Active Legal Advisor for Private Equity transactions during 2013. According to the Venture Intelligence League Tables, AZB finished the year with 166 points (across 42 qualifying deals). ALMT Legal and K Law vaulted to the second spot with 80 points (across 20 deals) each.   Amarchand & Mangaldas , Samvad Partners and NovoJuris finished joint third with 76 points each (across 19 deals). The Venture Intelligence League Tables, the first such initiative exclusively tracking transactions involving India-based companies, are based on volume of PE and M&A transactions (combined with credits based on fulfilment of criteria) advised by Transaction and Legal Advisory firms. AZB advised PE deals during the period included KKR’s acquisition of controlling stake in Alliance Tire Group and Baring Asia's $256 million investment in Lafarge India . Large transactio...