The Venture Intelligence Blog

The pace of outbound deals however was muted, reveals a Venture Intelligence study Foreign companies acquired majority stakes in 131 Indian companies during 2011, registering a 30% rise in such transactions as compared to the previous year, according to a study by Venture Intelligence, a research service focused on Private Equity and M&A transaction activity in India. Of these Inbound deals, there were 65 deals with an announced value of $9.99 billion. In comparison, 2010 had witnessed a total of 101 inbound deals, of which, there were 50 transactions with announced values totaling almost $8.4 billion. The largest inbound M&A deal by value announced during 2011 was Vodafone’s March 2011 buyout of the Essar Group’s stake in mobile phone services firm Vodafone Essar for $5.46 billion. The second largest inbound deal during the year was the acquisition of BPO firm Intelenet by UK’s Serco Group for an estimated $630 million, followed by International Paper’s acquisition of a 75% s...

Corporate law firm AZB & Partners and the Ernst & Young have topped the Venture Intelligence India League Tables for 2011. Ernst & Young – which advised a total of 93 qualifying transactions - topped the League Tables as the Most Active Transaction Advisor (both PE and M&A) for the year. Among legal advisors, AZB topped the tables in both the PE and M&A categories advising a total of 73 deals during the year. Both these firms had topped the league tables for the year 2010 as well. 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 advised by Transaction and Legal Advisory firms. Private Equity Deals Among PE transactions, AZB advised 45 deals during 2011 including GIC and Bain Capital’s $828 million investment in Hero Investments, and Warburg Pincus’ $150 million investment in Diligent Power. Other legal advisors who advised a signific...

The Venture Intelligence APEX’12 Private Equity & Venture Capital Summit, scheduled for February 14 at Mumbai, is to feature a special panel discussion on the Internet & Mobile sector. Speakers on the panel, which will include a mix of Angel & VC investors, Entrepreneurs from the sector and Advisory Firms, will provide their outlook on investments in the sector for the next 3-5 years. Speakers confirmed for the Internet & Mobile panel discussion include Mahesh Murthy, Founding Partner, Seedfund - one of the most prolific investors in startup IT companies in the country - and Alok Kejriwal, Founder, 2Win Group - an entrepreneur who has created several Internet- and Mobile-based businesses (like Contests2win, Mobile2win, Games2win, etc), raised VC funding for them and also successfully sold Mobile2win's China arm to Disney. Also confirmed to speak on the panel is former Bharti TeleTech CEO Sunil Goyal, an active angel investor and founder of early stage VC fund Yo...

Private Equity firms invested $10,117 million over 441 deals in India during the 12 months ending December 2011, compared to $8,187 million across 362 deals during the previous year, according to analysis by Venture Intelligence, a research service focused on Private Equity and M&A activity. These figures - which include VC investments and exclude PE investments in Real Estate - take the total investments by PE firms over the past five years to about $47 billion across 2,062 transactions. The latest Venture Intelligence data however reveals that PE investments in October-December 2011 declined to about $1,456 million (across 105 deals) compared to the $1,828 million invested (across 88 deals) in the same period in 2010 and $2,334 million invested (across 109 deals) in the immediate previous quarter. “The amount of PE capital deployed has declined for the fourth successive quarter in keeping with the economic uncertainty and the decline in public markets,” noted Arun Natarajan, CEO...

From the Press Release: ET NOW’s Super Angels, a special series on the ‘Starting Up’ show which provides a platform for start-ups to make pitches to Angel Investors, witnessed a Mumbai based start-up company – Fetise.com (Men’s Apparel e-commerce platform) raise capital up to Rs. 25 Crores from Seedfund, represented by Mahesh Murthy, one of the Super Angels on the show. On what attracted Seedfund to invest in Fetise.com, Mahesh Murthy, Managing Partner of Seedfund says, “Very often we see e-commerce start-ups who want to sell everything to everybody. But here we found a team that focussed on one target audience: upscale men and they’ve executed well to build a wide and deep line of products for the audience, as well as significantly differentiate from other e-com players.” On the experience of raising funds on the Super Angels platform, Chetan Bafna of Fetise.com says “The sheer pace of growth within e-commerce in India makes this an exciting business. Our fundraising process started 6...

Edited Extracts from the Press Release: ScaleArc , a Mumbai and Silicon Valley-based database infrastructure software maker founded by Varun Singh, former CTO of Web18, has secured a $5.33 million second round of financing. The round was led by Trinity Ventures with participation from existing investor Nexus Venture Partners. The new funds will accelerate geographic and staffing expansion to meet increased demand. In addition, ScaleArc announced the appointment of Justin Barney, who previously ran sales divisions at companies like Citrix and Juniper Networks, as president and COO. ScaleArc’s iDB software, which is available for MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle and Postgres database environments, offers real-time query analytics and control, instant horizontal scaling, caching, dynamic load balancing and more, all without any changes to existing applications or databases. ScaleArc customers include e-commerce, SaaS, online gaming and digital media companies. With exponentially growing data a...

From the Press Release: Accel Partners has completed Series A investment in Trivone Digital a Bangalore-based new age digital media and content company. The funds will be utilised by Trivone towards meeting its working capital requirements as well as pushing growth through the inorganic route in the months ahead. “We are delighted to have Accel Partners on board and look forward to working closely with them as we chart out a growth path for ourselves. We believe that the expertise gathered by Accel Partners over 25 years of building more than 300 successful enterprises will hold us in good stead,” said Subu Subramanyan, Founder and CEO of Trivone Digital Services. Trivone’s strategy is the ability to create world class content, which will enable it to build Digital media properties and offer managed services to clients. Currently the company offers services by way of creating, sourcing and packaging content for online delivery to a wide cross-section of large Enterprise customers. “Tri...