Inventus: Better Late Than Never

I took my time posting this one, even though the news has been out two days now. But frankly, nearly two years late coming along, I was hard put to find something scintillating to say about Inventus Capital, the new venture capital fund backed by Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur Kanwal Rekhi and friends. So the fund has a $125 million corpus — I was off by $25 million when I wrote first about them in August 2006 — and was formally launched in Bangalore two days ago. The firm intends to invest in 15-20 ‘early-growth’ companies and will invest not less than $1 million and not more than $10 million per company, says the press release.

But, coming back to the point: what took so long? Rekhi, who is a founding member of TiE as well, told a newspaper in December that his fund’s cross-border investment strategy — development in India, headquarters in the US — would only begin to play out in 2008 because the ‘timing’ was right. When I browse through the segments the fund has chosen to focus on — embedded software, mobile services, knowledge process outsourcing and so on — I wonder what would have been wrong about the ‘timing’ in early 2007. This is not ‘brave new world investing’. This is the tried and tested cross-border model of investing, phase two if you like. Still, better late than never, I guess.

On another note, interesting to see TiE buddies Saurabh Srivastava, Sridhar Mitta and BV Jagadeesh pop up on Inventus’ investment/advisory team. Quite the old boys’ party this one is turning out to be.

Photo: Inventus Capital Partners website