The Venture Intelligence Blog

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: 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...

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...

Edited extracts from the Press Release: Enterprise laptop backup and retrieval software firm Druva has received $12 million in a Series B round of funding led by Nexus Venture Partners with participation from existing investor Sequoia Capital India. The funding will be used to expand both the product offering and sales and marketing in North America, EMEA and Asia Pacific. “As the explosion of data continues, and so does proliferation of endpoint device types and the mobility of the workforce, Druva has demonstrated a unique capability to address the challenges associated with enterprise backup and endpoint data protection,” said Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Principal, Nexus Venture Partners. “Druva's disruptive innovation reduces the storage footprint and bandwidth requirement for backup by orders of magnitude compared to other industry solutions. With wide adoption of its on-premise and cloud-based solutions, the fast-growing company is racking up an impressive list of referen...

Citrix Systems has acquired Nexus Ventures-backed Cloud.com , an US-based provider of software infrastructure platforms for cloud providers. The company’s CloudStack product line helps providers deploy and manage simple, cost-effective cloud services that are scalable, secure and open. From the Venture Intelligence PE Deal database : Nexus first invested in Cloud.com (then called VMOps) in Aug 2009 and reinvested as part of the $11-M second round funding in May 2010. The other investors in the company included Index Ventures and Redpoint Ventures. The deal represents the third exit by Nexus in the last 12 months Previously, online classifieds website OLX was acquired by Napsters late last year, while Open source Web-conferencing company Dimdim was acquired by Salesforce.com earlier this year. For the detailed press release on the deal, please visit http://citrix.com/English/NE/news/news.asp?newsID=2313930

Economic Times recently published an article on the various types of agri-businesses are increasingly attracting VC attention. In an accompanying piece , Sandeep Singhal and Manoj Gupta of Nexus Ventures, provided their outlook on the sector. The agriculture sector presents a tremendous opportunity, given its size and large-scale inefficiencies, but building a large company is not easy. It requires domain knowledge, as local issues such as weather, pests, soil conditions, and water availability, and global factors such as commodity price swings can play havoc with any plan. On the supply side, their business model has to support a dispersed network, with the support of field activities and the need to work in different languages. Depending on where they play in the ecosystem, the company's systems and processes should be able to handle large numbers of cash transactions and prevent fraud and leakage. All of this is further complicated by the need to manage risks related to governm...

From the Press Release: Nexus Venture Partners, an early stage venture capital fund, announced today that it is launching a seed stage program called "Nexus Seed" which will help build a stronger entrepreneur ecosystem in India. Nexus Venture Partners will use the Nexus Seed program to identify and fund high potential entrepreneurs who are building technology and Internet companies. Through this initiative, Nexus will invest Rs. 20 lakhs to 2 crores ($50k-$500k) each in up to 50 companies over the next 5 years. Entrepreneurs are encouraged to submit a summary of their plans to plan@nexusvp.com . Nexus Venture Partners is the leading venture capital fund in India with total fund size of $320 million. Apart from investing in early to early growth companies, Nexus has also been incubating and investing in seed stage companies since 2006. These include Sedemac, Scalarc, Vdopia and several others. Many of these companies have gone on to raise further financing and build leadersh...

Edited Excerpts from the Press Release: Milpitas, Calif. – November 9, 2010 – Gluster, the leading provider of open source scale-out storage solutions, today announced it has closed an $8.5 million Series B round of funding led by Index Ventures with participation from the previous investor, Nexus Venture Partners. Gluster has been experiencing dramatic growth worldwide in sales, partnerships, and community adoption, driven by the move to cloud based architectures, the explosion in unstructured data, and the increasing virtualization of the data center. With this new investment round, Gluster will expand its sales, marketing and support teams and allocate additional resources to partner development. Multiple trends are driving Gluster’s growth across a wide-range of industry segments including healthcare, legal, media and hosting providers: Unstructured data is growing by 60 percent per year, creating a need for vastly different storage economics; over 20 percent of all compute worklo...

Edited excerpts from the press release: Aryaka Networks , a provider of cloud-based application acceleration and WAN optimization solution, has raised $14 million in Series A funding from Trinity Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners and Stanford University. Naren Gupta of Nexus Ventures has joined the company's board. Founded in November 2008 by Ajit Gupta (President & CEO) and Ashwath Nagaraj (VP of Engineering), Aryaka Networks, Inc. delivers cloud-based application acceleration and WAN optimization with true business results. The company is headquartered in Milpitas, California with offices in Bangalore, India. Key advantages of the Aryaka solution include a secure, scalable and reliable application acceleration and WAN optimization platform as a service, rapid deployment, ease of integration, complete visibility and a significantly lower total cost of ownership.

Economic Times has an article on how mainstream VCs are now increasingly investing in "bottom of the pyramid" opportunities. Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Venture Intelligence, the leading provider of data and analysis on private equity, venture capital and M&A deals in India. View free samples of Venture Intelligence newsletters and reports. Email the author at arun@ventureintelligence.in

A slightly modified version of the longer article that appeared on WSJ's India Chief Mentor Blog : An article in IBD's Investors.com highlights the strong rise in the popularity of video advertising among brand advertisers in the US as well as the potential headroom for further growth. (Hat tip: Paul Kedrosky ) Online video ads are more engaging than other types, say ad executives. Woolford says a good example is Toyota's "Swagger Wagon" ads for its Sienna minivan. In one, a father and mother relate, in rapper style, about how cool their minivan is. It's a viral hit, nearing 1 million views on YouTube in two weeks...The rise of more portable devices such as Apple's (AAPL) iPad tablet computer will only accelerate the amount of video viewed online, which should boost ad rates, says Retrevo co-founder Manish Rathi. This strong growth trend should spell good news for Indian VC funds Helion Ventures and Nexus Ventures, which have, among them, invested into t...

US-based Cloud.com, formerly VMOps, has raised an $11 million Series B round led by new investor Index Ventures. Current investors Redpoint Ventures and India-focussed Nexus Venture Partners also participated in this round, bringing the company’s total funding to date to $17.6 million. Cloud.com provides the latest and the most advanced software platform to bhttp://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=5421892&postID=8828431598215020283uild highly scalable, highly reliable cloud computing environments. http://cloud.com/company_company_release.html javascript:void(0)