The Venture Intelligence Blog

Ever since US-based venture capital firm Canaan Partners decided (in 2014) to scale down its India operations,    Venture Intelligence  has been keenly tracking what its India team - headed by one of the country's first entrepreneur-turned-VC Alok Mittal- would do next.  The answer is now in... To track the progress of these ventures and all other happenings that matter in the Indian Private Equity/Venture Capital ecosystem, just Sign Up for the Venture Intelligence Deal Digest - India's longest serving Transaction Update newsletter.

Canaan has already invested in Indian online classifieds firms like Bharatmatrimony, Cartrade and Indiaproperty and is hungry for more investments in the segment. Alok Mittal who heads the US headquartered venture firm's operations in India explains why and the dynamics of the sector in an interview to BusinessLine . Extracts (emphasis mine): Exits have been attractive both in India and globally. In fact, in India, online classifieds has been the only Internet segment to have thriving public companies in form of InfoEdge and Justdial.  ...Globally, this has been borne out with listed online classified businesses trading at 6-7 times revenue on an average, and commanding around 25 per cent operating profits . Within the Indian context, classified businesses such as Naukri.com and Justdial.com have demonstrated similar profitability, defensibility and valuation multiples. ...Amongst Indian online classified sectors, jobs, local and matrimony have been demons...

Startupcentral has an interview with Alok Mittal of Canaan Partners on the $45 million first round funding led by his firm for Wipro veteran and Mindtree Co-founder Ashok Soota's new IT Services venture. What do you find interesting about the business model? The business model draw for us (Canaan) was the outsourcing play. We already have a couple of portfolio companies (iYogi and UnitedLex) in that area. As far as the software services sector is concerned, in the past, significant shifts in information technology spends have created space for new companies. There is a shift taking place now in terms of enterprises in the US and Europe adopting cloud and mobility-based solutions. We think Happiest Minds has the potential to grab a large slice of this market. Will they work closely with some of your India and global portfolio companies which are in the same area? Absolutely. In fact, the founders have been very diligent about walking through both our and Intel Capital’s portfolio c...