Archive for March 2008

Barcamp Mumbai 3 Update

By StartupCentral
Thursday, March 27th, 2008

BarCamp Mumbai 3 is getting cooler by the minute — and I don’t mean just the new logo. They’ve added a parallel event — BlogCamp Mumbai Style. This will also run from 9.00 am to 6.00 pm and is at the same venue, School of Management at IIT Bombay. The camp is actually a continuation of BlogCamp Pune that was held last June. They’ve moved to Mumbai for their second edition. I am looking forward to the session on ‘How to use WordPress’.

Note, even BlogCamp is not offering any badges, but the wiki says free T-shirts are available.

Quick update on other upcoming events to watch:

Startup Lunch: The Proto guys have launched a new initiative and it kicked off in New Delhi today. This is speed dating applied to startup networking. You have one hour to talk to as many startup founders as possible across a table. The event is aimed at getting young professionals interested in taking up jobs with startups. Very good idea. I was chatting with Vijay Anand, Proto’s curator, a couple of days ago and happened to ask him why Delhi first and not Mumbai. He shot back, “No enthusiasm in Mumbai.” Turns out that Mumbai came up with only 2-3 registrations.

There are a whole lot of other BarCamps coming up — Delhi (its fourth), Rajkot, Ahmedabad and of course, Bangalore (sixth edition).

And, Bangalore’s next OpenCoffee Club meet is on March 30th.

Categories : TMT
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Helion’s New Fund, New Plan

By Snigdha Sengupta
Friday, March 21st, 2008

Helion Venture Partners raised its second fund with a $210 million corpus  early this month. It is the only venture capital firm in India at present that has raised two funds within 20 months. The first fund, $140 million, was raised in August 2006. The second  fund has been raised primarily from investors in the US and the list includes a few university endowments. Helion has piled up deals rapidly in the past year and it is not surprising that they needed to raise a second fund so quickly. Fund I has invested in 11 companies and is over 50 per cent invested now.

Last week I caught up with Helion co-founder Kanwaljit Singh in Mumbai and found out more about the investment plans from Fund II. The original theme doesn’t change much — technology-powered businesses but the firm has now added consumer services to its plank. The firm thinks that some interesting early stage business models are beginning to emerge in that area and a solo focus on technology cannot sustain deal-flow in the Indian market beyond a point. Incidentally, the first venture capital firm to focus on the consumer theme in India was Mumbai-based Matrix Partners.

Helion is beefing up its team to manage the expanded focus. The investment team will add one more to the current four, which includes Singh, Sanjeev Aggarwal, Ashish Gupta and Rahul Chandra, and a couple of folks on the operating side.  So what kind of consumer niches are looking interesting? “Maybe speciality retail, financial services, education,” says Singh, who earlier led Carlyle’s venture capital investments in India.

The new focus will not see a scale up in deal ticket sizes. The per deal ticket size cap remains $10 million. It may look at more mature businesses than usual but the firm does not see that affecting its focus on early-stage start-ups. The portfolio so far has been quite well balanced — six in the seed-to-early stage and five in the mid-to-growth stage. Some of the companies in the portfolio include Kirusa, Mindworks, Jigrahak and MakeMyTrip.

Image Courtesy: Helion Venture Partners

Categories : TMT
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Barcamp Debut

By Snigdha Sengupta
Sunday, March 9th, 2008

After a over a year of expounding on BarCamps and unconferences I finally attended one — BarCamp MU3 at the KJ Somaiya Institute of Engineering and Information Technology at Sion.

So what does a BarCamp at the university level look like? A bunch of maybe forty guys and girls, not all of them students, sitting at their desks and taking in the presentation going on up front. The mood was nice. Speakers took questions or opinions from other participants at regular intervals, some became extended conversations and I finally saw first hand how an unconference actually works. The big one — BarCamp Mumbai3 — comes up on March 29 at IIT Bombay.

I chatted a bit with the guys who put the show together — Saumil Parekh (front row third from left in the photo) is a final year student and alongwith friend Maulik Shah, has set up a web design company called Cafe Infotech which he says is an interim thing before he joins his family business. This was Mumbai’s third university-level BarCamp.

Categories : TMT
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Budget Mum on Tax Pass-through for VCs

By Snigdha Sengupta
Monday, March 3rd, 2008

Budget 2008 came and went by last weekend and not a murmur on venture capital.  A lot of folks in the industry had hoped for a word on the tax pass-through benefit that was withdrawn in Budget 2007 except for investments in select sectors. Much is expected in terms of deal activity in the early stage segment this year. Investors who entered the market last year have more or less settled in and we should see some interesting alliances being forged in sectors such as consumer services, Internet and mobile, niche outsourcing and tech products.

Shantanu Surpure a legal expert on US and India early-stage deals has a take on the devil in the fineprint for venture capital in this budget. Read his take at VCCircle‘s Union Budget 2008-09: Much left unsaid for the VC/PE eco-system.

On a different note, couple of events in Mumbai to look forward to this week. Tomorrow, March 4th, is IAMAI’s ‘Mobile VAS 2008′ conference. Paymate founder Ajay Adiseshann is one of the speakers. The other one is BarCampMU3 on March 8th at KJ Somaiya Institute Sion. This is a long pending camp. It was originally scheduled for last September but was called off for unspecified reasons.

Categories : News
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