The Venture Intelligence Blog

Extract from an Economic Times article by Manish Kanchan, Managing Director of SAGE Capital. Very often we see entrepreneurs consulting with well wishers, old-time chartered accountants or their loyal CFOs during the deal-making process. Usually this is the first time anybody is dealing with private equity transactions and are therefore completely out of their depths. Sometimes, they are also insecure about their own future position in the company. ...Investment bankers are your allies. Choose them based on their track record of having closed similar transactions Ask for references and speak with them. Do not appoint them based on the valuation they promise you. Investment bankers do not sign the cheque. Once appointed, trust them and encourage them to provide you with honest feedback directly. The same applies for lawyers as well. ...The business plan must be realistic with a slight optimistic bias. It should also be linked to past performance. If the business has grown at 15% over l...

Extract from The Economic Times profile of Carat-Lane Online jewellery retail portal Carat-Lane aims to bypass the hiccups that have laid low a number of e-commerce players, by adopting a two-pronged strategy – building its own delivery network even as it increases the geographical footprint. ... Sacheti, who co-founded the company with Srinivas Gopalan in 2008, expects to service more than 100 cities in India by the end of the current financial year. The company expects to post revenue of . 100 crore for financial year 2011-12, a 50% rise from the previous fiscal's top-line numbers.CaratLane, which specialises in the sale of solitaires and diamonds, is now considering entering different product categories such as watches, to diversify its range, but only in a phased manner. "We have sold more than 3,000 solitaires in 2010, which has led us to believe that sustainability of jewellery is much better than product categories of lower value," Sacheti said. The margins are be...

Edited excerpts from the Press Release: Franklin Templeton Private Equity Strategy, a private equity portfolio advised by Darby Asia Investors (India) Limited, has invested Rs 45 crore in Symbiotec Pharmalab Limited. Symbiotec is engaged in research, development, manufacturing and marketing of research based Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (“API”s) for corticosteroids and hormones. It has an extensive product portfolio of over 40 corticosteroids and hormones APIs and supplies its products to leading pharmaceutical companies in India and overseas including marquee names such GSK Pharmaceuticals, Teva, Ranbaxy and Cipla. The funds raised from FTPES will be applied towards backward integration by setting up fermentation facilities which is expected to improve the Company’s competitive positioning and profitability. This also is expected to help the Company to attract customers from highly regulated markets such as US, Europe and Japan. Systematix Capital Services Pvt. Ltd was the exclu...

Economic Times has a profile of the entrepreneurial story of Bangalore-based "Customer Experience Management" Software firm CustomerXPs. Though the team was in place, it took us over a year to develop the first sample. By January 2008, we started taking feedback from prospective clients and realised that the product was becoming very complex. That's when we started interacting with Sharad Hegde, former Infosys chief technology officer, for his advice on simplifying the product. By mid-2008, he joined our firm as a consultant and also became an angel investor for CustomerXPs. He has invested about $1 million (Rs 4.6 crore) in the company. Our deadline for earning the first revenue was August 2009, but we missed it because we couldn't close a deal. However, the silver lining was that we were upgrading our product, which was an ongoing process. Despite realising that selling software products is difficult in India — many such companies have been forced to change to soft...

This post is for the benefit of (and comments from) fellow paid content publishers. Constant Contact, a web-based email newsletter/marketing service that we at Venture Intelligence have been using to send out our paid for Deal Digest Daily newsletters sent us the following message - out of the blue - yesterday: Response (Kristen D) Dear Arun, I am sorry to report that your account, login name: "entureintelligence" (sic) , has been flagged for uploading several industry spamtraps along with a host of problematic addresses. As a result, we will no longer be able to provide Constant Contact services to you. The marketplace associated with sending email has changed dramatically, and as a result, we have had to adapt our complaint tolerances and list management inspections to meet the current business environment. While we appreciate your consideration, we can not afford the risk and exposure associated with your account. High abuse complaints result in getting our servers blocke...