Last week ChrysCapital, some of you may remember them as Chrysalis Capital from another time, raised a $1.25 billion fund, its fifth so far (the last one had a $550 million corpus and was raised just over a year ago). This is the largest private equity fund raised for India till date and that too by a homegrown firm. Quite a feat for a firm that started out just eight years ago with a $64 million fund.
The reason I like ChrysCapital is because of its startup origins. Two college buddies at Harvard Business School, Ashish Dhawan and Raj Kondur, thought it would be cool to replicate the Silicon Valley venture capital model in India. The plan was to invest in the hot new thing — Internet start-ups. They sold the idea to a bunch of investors in the US, including HBS, and came back to Mumbai to launch their first fund.
The idea flopped. The Internet bust wiped out most of their investments and what could have been the country’s first Silicon Valley-style venture capital firm never took off. The two friends also parted ways, not so happily. Kondur retreated to his home base in Bangalore and emerged a few years later with yet another entrepreneurial venture — a BPO company called Nirvana Business Solutions. When I met him last, about two years ago, he was brimming over with excitement. Last I checked, Nirvana is humming along quite happily.
Dhawan also retreated to home base in Delhi and took ChrysCapital with him. And as most prudent startups do, the firm changed its business model — the country’s first standalone private equity firm was born. The rest, of course, is history. When I asked him a year ago whether he ever stopped to think about the old days, he said, “Sure, it was fun while it lasted. But we made mistakes, we didn’t know how to do a lot of things.”
I suppose it was too long ago to wonder whether the two friends who named their start-up after a college fest are still in touch. Their legacy, though, will always bind them together. After all, one small idea practically seeded a multi-billion dollar private equity market, one that even Wall Street’s big boys cannot afford to ignore anymore.
Image Courtesy: ChrysCapital
