The Venture Intelligence Blog

VC investments in April – at $125 million across 31 investments - marked a 22 month low in value terms. While the value of investments was down 20% compared to the same period last year, volume (or number of investments) was down by 6%. Compared to the previous month, value of investments was down by as much as 80% and volume fell by 18.4%. (Venture Capital is defined by Venture Intelligence as Seed Capital to “Series D”/Fourth round of investment of up to $20 million in companies that are less than 10 years old. The monthly analysis includes investments of over $20-M as well in tech startups that are less than 10 years old.) April reported just 3 deals above $10M plus bracket compared to 11 deals in the previous month Series A witnesses uptick amidst gloomy April Venture Capital funds invested across 17 Series A deals up from 14 deals in the previous month. All other rounds were either flat or down. Angel activity remains at low ebb.  Angel i...

In a recent interview to Venture Intelligence, Shailendra Singh discussed some of the firm’s newer investments in the early stage segment including in the online payments space, the progress at a few existing portfolio companies and the active role the firm is playing in helping its portfolio companies scale and succeed in India and globally. Prior to joining the firm in 2006, Singh was a strategy consultant at Bain & Company in New York and before that, an entrepreneur in the digital media industry. Venture Intelligence: How does Sequoia go about identifying potential early stage investments in India? Is there anything different you are doing today than, say, a couple of years back? Shailendra Singh: There is a lot more focus on technology investing and early stage investing. In general, as you might remember a few years ago, we were doing primarily growth investing but in the past 18-odd months, we have had a very strong focus on early stage and that’s continuing. In terms...

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...

Manish Sabharwal, founder of education and staffing services firm Teamlease (who earlier founded and sold India Life) articulates in an article in Mint, how he went about choosing his latest set of PE/VC Investors. Sabharwal and Reddy decided to raise Rs. 100 crore to start with. But since both labour and education are highly regulated, Sabharwal was cautious about finding the right financier. “We wanted a domestic investor because they understand India. We didn’t want a tourist investor from the US who would give us a high valuation but freak out every time an article appeared in the newspaper,” he says. Sabharwal spoke to 5-10 investors. “I did my due diligence, about the personalities in the investing firm, talked to people at their investee companies, and other companies that they had dealings with. I tried to get a match of how long we think it’s going to take and how long they are going to give us.” Venture Intelligence is the leading provider of data and analysis on private eq...