Sequoia Capital India picked up former Sify CEO and co-founder R Ramaraj as senior advisor over the weekend. That’s two Sify scalps after George Zacharias, former Sify COO and then Yahoo! India chief, got $20 million funding for his start-up (yet to be unveiled) from Sequoia. So will Ramraj be advising Zacharias?
Sequoia (which was WestBridge Capital Partners till last year) itself is back in the early-stage funding space with a vengeance. It has just lauched a $300 million fund and the fund’s co-founders, KP Balaraj and Sumir Chadha, are quite determined to get their VC tag back. The firm has always done interesting deals and it will be well worth watching their moves in the next few months.
When Citigroup does decide who it wants to sell its BPO to — the latest names are Genpact and Firstsource — someone please wake me up…the suspense is not interesting anymore.
Suhel Seth has put money behind a YouTube clone called TheBig.tv. Congratulations to entrepreneur Alankar Jain (he’s from NDTV) and no offence to start-ups, but I’m beginning to believe that India is just good at making first copies of the original. Too many me-toos, too often, in the Internet space.