Archive for July 2008

VC Deals Roundup: January to June 2008

These days Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers’ (KPCB) home page shouts out ‘In Search Of The Next Big Idea’. The firm’s deal run in India from January through June would suggest that this market is a part of that big search — four out of the 13-odd early-stage investments by venture capitalists in India during the first six months of 2008 are KPCB deals, in partnership with Sherpalo Ventures. Incidentally, KPCB is yet to house a local team in India — it has two offices in China — and prefers instead to co-invest with its preferred local partner Sherpalo, led here by Sandeep Murthy. KPCB-Sherpalo’s first deal in India was InfoEge, owner of jobs portal Naukri in May 2006 — $6 million for a 5 per cent stake. Some people might remember the legendary John Doerr (he’s backed Google and just about every other notable technology company in Silicon Valley) being in Mumbai briefly to announce the deal and KPCB’s intent for India.

Overall, venture capitalists invested over $90 million across 13 companies in the first six months of calendar year 2008.

CompanyInvestor (s)SectorStageDeal Size ($mn)
Data Source:Media & Industry Reports
CleartripDFJ, Kleiner, OthersConsumer InternetSeries C18.5
Consim InfoMayfield, OthersConsumer InternetSeries B11.75
JivoxHelion, OpusConsumer InternetSeries A10.7
Gridstone ResearchHelion, OthersAnalyticsSeries B10
PaymateMayfield, KleinerMobile PaymentsSeries B9.64
VeveoNorwestConsumer InternetSeries B7.8
mKhojKleiner, OthersMobile VASSeries A7
SatNav TechSequoiaSoftware-7
Aujas NetworksIDG VenturesSoftwareSeed3
StudyPlacesKleiner, OthersConsumer InternetSeries A3
Vriti InfocomIntel CapitalConsumer Internet-2.5
AyurVaidAcumen FundHealthcareSeries A1.13
KomliNexusConsumer InternetSeries AUndisclosed

First Half 2008 India PE Fundraising Robust

EMPEA reports that private equity fund raising in emerging markets (Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Russia) is on track to beat 2007 levels — see EMPEA Release. A total of 104 funds have raised more than $35 billion in the first six months of 2008, up 68 per cent from the amount raised in the same period last year. The release further states that fund raising in 2008 so far has been led by Emerging Asia, which EMPEA defines primarily as China and India. In fact, interest in markets such as China and India is even higher this year — Emerging Asia accounted for 75 per cent of total funds raised in the first six months of 2008 against 55 per cent in 2007. China has raised $11.2 billion while India has raised $3 billion.

In a separate study Thomson Reuters reports — Thomson Reuters Release — that fund raising in the Asia Pacific region (excluding Japan) amounted to $17.8 billion during the six months ended June 2008, with Hong Kong scoring the highest with $9.29 billion. India came in fourth — it raised $1.49 billion, against $513.7 million in the same period last year. Thomson Reuters also reports that total private equity investments in the region dropped 16.4 per cent to $3.7 billion against $4.4 billion in the same period last year. Investments in India were at $1.47 billion, up 17.7 per cent from $1.25 last year.

Now, if you compare the numbers from each report, just looking at the India fund raising numbers, there are clear inconsistencies. Thomson Reuters says that India has raised $1.49 billion while EMPEA puts it at $3 billion. There still does not seem any unanimity on investment and fund raising data and this makes tracking actual industry performance rather difficult.

Of course, the positive takeaway from both reports is that India remains high on the radar of global private equity investors and the downturn in the US market has not impacted the inflow of funds yet, even if investments are at a slight dip.

Breaking the Mould: Niche Entrepreneurship

Some weeks ago, a reporting assignment took me to Malegaon, a village in Baramati, which lies about 99-100 kilometers outside Pune city. My destination was an emu farm, Bhagirathi Hatcheries, in Malegaon, one of the first in the state of Maharashtra. Sandip Sadashiv Taware, the owner of Bhagirathi Hatcheries, used to be a poultry (chicken) farmer who turned to emu farming in 2001 when profits in chicken farming dipped. He is one of about 300 farmers in Maharashtra today who depend on this ostrich-like bird for their livelihood.

Looking at a live emu there is no way I would curry it in my kitchen. It is possibly the ugliest bird I have ever seen, though it also happens to be quite friendly and rather curious about sports shoes — a gang of four of those tall (about five feet each) blue-necked creatures eyed me quizzically for half a minute and then proceeded to inspect my already frayed sneakers with their do-not-mess-with-me beaks for a full eight minutes.

No, I don’t see myself grabbing an emu tandoori leg in a hurry (it is supposed to be one of many delicacies) — and that would be one big tandoori leg, about a foot at least — but selling emu meat is a growing and profitable business for Taware and his ilk. He turned in profits of Rs 10 lakh this March and is now working up even bigger plans, among them emu tourism and a cooperative meat processing factory for Maharashtra’s emu farmers.

I have not met a lot of farmers, I must admit, but could not help marveling at Taware. In typical city-slicker fashion I had not taken my laptop along because I thought, “Baramati, umm…village…no Internet.” And there was Taware, when I walked into his office after a jaunt around the emu enclosure, talking to his business partner about what price to quote on eBay for carved emu eggs — the shells of the eggs that do not yield chicks are hand-carved and sold. “No waste, everything can be recycled,” he explained before handing out a visiting card made from recycled paper. Baramati, the town, happens to be all wired-up thanks to WiFi and much of the district is also well connected.

Next time outside Bombay city limits, I will pack in less ignorance and more humility.

Read the latest Outlook Business cover package on niche businesses such as emu farming and sewage cleaning. These are the stories of 12 entrepreneurs who chose to start up in some very unconventional businesses. They are not quite the ‘glamourous’ Web 2.0 and technology startups usually featured on this blog, but have an equally, if not more important, role to play in the development of emerging India.

Accel-Erasmic: India’s Second VC Merger

Mint reports this morning (surprisingly in its news briefs section) that Erasmic Venture Fund, a Bangalore-based seed fund that counts search giant Google among its investors, is merging (read: has been acquired) with Palo Alto-based Accel Partners, an investor in Facebook among several other technology-related companies. There is no official release up yet on either firm’s websites — update: official release – but the details of the merger, according to the Mint report, are as follows:

  • The new entity is being called Accel India Venture Fund
  • Will raise a $60 million fund this quarter; invest in seed-to-early stage technology and non-technology companies
  • Erasmic’s four-member team stays on as fund managers

The Sequoia Capital-WestBridge Capital Partners merger in May 2006 comes up as instant recall. It was the first acquisition of an Indian venture capital firm by a larger Silicon Valley entity but, the parallel ends there. The Accel-Erasmic merger, from the information available, looks like a portfolio buyout and little else.

Since its launch in early 2007, Erasmic, which has been investing from a $10 million fund, has built a portfolio of 12 companies. The firm was founded by Subrata Mitra and Prashanth Prakash (photos). The buyout gives Accel, which has had no presence in India so far, a ready-made asset base. The deal comes at a time when returns in the US venture capital market in general are on a downtrend. Most of Erasmic’s portfolio companies are very young and in segments such as social networking (Chakpak), search engine optimization (Position2), healthcare (Perfint), food retail (Kaatizone) and mobile (Kirusa). Though the portfolio does seem a bit skewed towards Web 2.0 companies, Accel’s broader focus should balance things out over time. Accel manages $4 billion in funds globally and apart from the US, invests in Europe, Israel and China.

Portfolio buyouts could become a trend as smaller players jostle for space with bigger and stronger firms, notably of the foreign kind. India seems to be finally emerging as a viable venture capital investing market and it is a matter of time before overseas investors from mature markets such as the US and Europe begin to seek a direct presence here. Today, in fact, the Indian market is in the enviable situation of having too many investors and too few deals — making the environment ripe for a shakeout.

Assuming that more such mergers are imminent, the Sequoia-WestBridge relationship definitely wins over the Accel-Erasmic one. Sequoia’s acquisition of WestBridge did bring on board an India portfolio of 30-plus companies but the merger was built on a much deeper relationship. Prior to the 2006 merger, Sequoia had debuted in India in 2003 with a $22 million investment in Bangalore-based business process outsourcing company 24/7 Customer. It followed up with two co-investment deals with WestBridge — Bharti Telesoft in December 2005 and Mauj Telecom in March 2006. The informal working relationship between the two firms in the run-up to the merger made it more of a partnership of equals. Sure Sequoia managed $3.5 billion in funds globally at the time but WestBridge was no small fry either. It already managed $350 million in funds and pretty much dominated the early-stage space in India — an advantage that Erasmic does not have.

It is not clear yet whether Accel and Erasmic shared any such relationship prior to the merger. It may not even matter in the longer term. But as evident from the fortunes of Sequoia Capital India today, it doesn’t hurt either.

VC Circle has more details on the deal in a interview with Erasmic co-founder Prashant Prakash.

Photo Courtesy: Accel Partners

Proto.in grows up

Vijay Anand, Proto.in’s chief organizer, is already populating his to-do list in preparation for the next edition of the unique startup showcase event scheduled for December in Bangalore. “We’re pulling the January 2009 edition to December. So this year we will actually do three editions,” he says. Next year, therefore, will have only one edition, instead of the usual bi-annual format, and it will be held in Mumbai. The significantly higher scale and scope of the event at the recently concluded New Delhi edition (July 18-19) is a big reason for shifting to a once-a-year format.

The New Delhi edition, held at the Indian Institute of Technology, saw over 400 people attend, among them representatives from about 30 venture capital firms. “Three weeks before the event we had only 150 registrations and based on that we targeted that 200 people would turn up. But in the last three weeks registrations just shot up. And this time we had more startups and entrepreneurs registering than usual. In the past students have been a big contingent,” he says. This is a good sign because Proto.in will now be able to tighten its content much more around entrepreneurship and differentiate its value-proposition from other loosely formatted unconferencing events such as BarCamps. That does not mean BarCamps have no role to play. In fact, as platforms such as Proto.in and Headstart take on the role of playing intermediaries between startups and customers or investors, BarCamps can go back to being simple and fun networking gigs for entrepreneurs.

Proto.in July 2008 was also the event’s first foray outside Chennai, its city of birth. The intent was to take the platform national. There were companies from Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and Mumbai, of course, but also a reasonably large contingent from the National Capital Region (NCR). Break-out numbers by region were not available.

Going national has helped in another constructive manner — both the organizers and venture capitalists who were at the event said that the quality of startups this time was much better. The 16 showcase finalists were chosen out of 90 applications. That is actually less than the number of applicants in the previous edition — 120. “While there were more applicants last time, when we put them through our selection filters, the reduction in numbers was drastic. This time we got less of business plans and more of actual companies,” says Anand. Of course, even some of these ‘actual companies’ are still quite raw — read Clearstone’s Rahul Khanna’s take on startups showcased at the event.

As the event gets bigger, the filters or parameters for selecting startups will need to become more stringent. Some of this was put into execution at the New Delhi edition. While the organizers did follow the usual selection-by-jury format — much of the jury is drawn from Proto.in’s steering committee — they also decided to get the applicants introduced to similar companies and potential customers in their space who vetted the commercial viability of their services and products.

At the Bangalore edition next, the organizers hope to be able to showcase 20 startups, against 16 this time and 14 in the previous edition. Incidentally, there is a possibility that the Bangalore edition will be clubbed with The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) Bangalore chapter’s ‘Entrepreneurship Summit’ but nothing has been firmed up yet. It does seem a bit incongruous to see Proto.in, which is built on the open source collaborate and share philosophy, align with TiE, which is essentially a closed-user network. At the same time, given that both work towards the same objective — fostering entrepreneurship — working together may not be such as bad thing after all.

It has not all been great going — out of the 86 startups showcased at Proto.in since inception, Anand says, four have shut shop. Also, while getting startups funded is not Proto’s main agenda, money ultimately is what gets things going. About 10 per cent of the startups who apply to Proto.in, do so in the hope of raising venture funding. That’s not really happening at acceptable levels yet, but as Proto.in grows up and matures, and it is doing so fast, the rest should follow.

Crisis at CVCI?

There are few people as synonymous with Indian private equity as Ajay Relan. Therefore, when speculation mounts about his moving on from Citi Venture Capital International’s India operations to start up on his own, it is an exciting thought, to put it mildly. None of the reports that have appeared so far have been confirmed yet. In fact Relan himself denies any such plans.

While the two may or may not be related, Citigroup Inc’s troubles overseas on account of the US subprime crisis are now well documented — it closed the second quarter of fiscal 2008 (April-June) with $2.5 billion losses against a net income of $6.23 billion in the corresponding quarter in 2007. In May, Vikram Pandit, the firm’s just over six months old CEO who took over from Charles Prince, launched some hard restructuring measures to stem losses. The bank plans to write down more than $350 billion in assets over the next 2-3 years. This includes $9 billion on account of Old Lane, a hedge fund founded by Pandit which Citi bought in May 2007 for $800 million — read the press release on Old Lane’s restructuring.

Citi’s private equity business is contained within the Institutional Clients Group, a division that was formed in October 2007 with Pandit at the helm. The private equity business has three arms — Citi Private Equity, Citi Venture Capital International and Metalmark Capital. Citi Venture Capital International or CVCI attends to investments in global growth markets such as China, India and Emerging Europe and manages over $3.5 billion in investments and committed capital.

Relan has been at the helm of CVCI India since 1995 and last year the firm said it would invest a fresh $1.5 billion here over three years. At the time CVCI was in the process of raising a global $4.5 billion Growth Partnership LP Fund II, from which the fresh allocation to India would come — this incidentally would be CVCI’s second fund since inception to have a larger than usual third-party investor base, something that Relan has been openly enthusiastic about because it would reduce the dependence on Citi for funds.

There doesn’t seem to be any update on whether this fund has been raised yet. CVCI has not been very active on the dealmaking front yet this year, though it has executed quite a few exits. So far, reported investments in 2008 are $42 million Global Capital Markets in February and additional capital infusion in Sharekhan this March.

When I spoke to Relan last June he had big plans for CVCI in India. The firm’s total investments here at the time were at $500 million but he planned to up the ante and get into bigger deals along the way (upto $250 million per deal). If Relan does quit CVCI, much of these plans could hang in the balance and CVCI would lose out on some invaluable experience — few understand the Indian investing environment as intimately as Relan — which is critical at a time when India’s private equity market is transitioning from a cottage industry to a global influencer.

Dimdim’s DD Ganguly gears up for market expansion

Open source web conferencing startup Dimdim, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, with development operations in Hyderabad, recently raised $6 million in Series B funding from Draper Richards and existing investors Index Ventures and Mumbai-based Nexus India Capital. In its first round, the company had raised $2.4 million. The company, which has three products just out of beta — Dimdim Free, Dimdim Pro and Dimdim Enterprise — employs 19 people across its offices in the US and India. Co-founder and CEO, DD Ganguly, who sold his first company AIM Inc in 2001 to Computer Associates, spoke to Startupcentral about how the company will deploy the fresh funds, revenue streams and the curious story of how Dimdim came to be known by its name. Edited excerpts:

You’ve raised venture money in a difficult fund-raising environment. How tough was it?

In our case it was not so difficult because we were not actually planning to raise money at this point of time. Because Dimdim has a lot of traction in the open source community and after our launch a lot of venture capitalists came to us. Our plan was to raise money a few months later into the year. But since venture capitalists started speaking with us around December…we were just having casual conversations at the time…we got multiple term sheets in this difficult environment.

You have an interesting mix of investors — two based in the US and one in Mumbai. What does this combination bring to the table?

If you look at the investors collectively — Draper Richards, Index Ventures, Nexus India Capital — the three have very rich experience in collaboration software and also in open source software. Naren Gupta from Nexus, for instance, he sits on the board of Red Hat. Nexus is a cross-border firm and the gentleman who is on our board, Suvir Sujan, sits in Mumbai. Then Draper Richards has invested in both Hotmail and Skype. And finally Index has invested in Skype and a number of open source companies.

How do you plan to deploy the $6 million?

It will be used primarily for increasing our marketing efforts. Two, getting in place a bigger sales force in place. It is really about market expansion at this point of time. Our product is in place…so we’re really going out now and focusing on the business aspects.

You’ve spoken about a premium product in the press. Could you elaborate?

If you look at Dimdim today, there are three flavours to it, three deployment options in which the product is rolled out. The first is Dimdim Free, which itself rolls out in two different variants. One is an open source community edition and the other is a free hosting edition. You don’t have to pay us anything at all. The second product is Dimdim Pro and the third product is Dimdim Enterprise. Now Dimdim Enterprise is a version of the software which can either be installed on the customer’s own hardware or the person can install it on his server and then he can provide services to his customers or it can be a dedicated hosted service where the customer is not sharing infrastructure with any of our other customers.

How are Pro and Enterprise priced?

Dimdim Pro is extremely affordable. It is $99 per year. It is very attractively priced so that we can really capture this market. If you compare it with what competition provides, it is a fraction of that cost. Dimdim Enterprise starts at $2000 per year and it scales up…normally the customers that we’re closing right now, it works out to $15,000-$17,000 per year.

Are you also exploring other revenues streams?

In the Dimdim Free version, we are offering a free audio conferencing service. It is free to the end customer but on the back-end, the service providers give us a certain revenue share. In future we may look at revenues from advertisements.

How do you split operations between the US and India?

What we have done is quite different from what most other companies have done. Not only do we do development in India, we are also doing sales and marketing out of India. The three large divisions in the company — engineering, marketing and sales — are all small global divisions. Some people are in the US, some people are in India. We will grow similarly even as we scale the organization…keep the nature intact. So, for example, we have done all our sales out of India till now and now we are adding on some folks in the US.

How did the name Dimdim come about?

First or all, Dimdim has nothing to do with my initials. We had started the company with a different name and 5-6 months had rolled by and after that I realized that it was high time to change the name. We collected about 15,000 names from a domain name service provider. And we said that we are not going to leave this room until we have finalized a name. We made a few rules. One, the name has to have high recall. If you listen to it once, it should go into your system. Nobody should have difficulty remembering the name. Second, it would have to be an international name. For example, my name, Debdatta, cannot be pronounced in most countries. Even outside Bengal most people cannot pronounce it. I was very sensitive to that. I was clear that even in Japan people should be able to pronounce it. Third, the transmission from the sound to the spelling had to be completely clear. Fourth, the transmission from the spelling to the sound had to be clear. Dimdim was the only name that survived all the rules.

Photo Courtesy: Dimdim

First Half VC Deal Run Robust

Good news for Indian startups and early stage companies. Venture capital investments during the first six months of calendar year 2008 touched $340 million across 51 companies. This compares very favourably with investments during all of 2007 which saw investments at $540 million across 98 companies. It may be too optimistic to hope that venture capital investments will touch $1 billion by the end of the year, but no harm done in aiming high.

Significantly, during the first six months this year, non-technology companies accounted for 40% of deals. Technology companies continue to dominate with a 60 per cent share but this has been gradually reducing over the years. Venture Intelligence’s Arun Natarajan notes, “Venture capital investments are increasingly focusing on alternative energy, media, retail and other consumer demand-led sectors.” Venture Intelligence is a Chennai-based research firm focused on the private equity and venture capital space and has just released its second quarter (April-June) findings deal activity in the Indian venture capital and private equity — VI Private Equity Release — space. The venture capital findings — VI Venture Capital Release — are in collaboration with the US-IVCA.

Following is a list of the top five deals in the venture/early-stage space:

  • Obopay: $20 million from Essar Communications, Promethean India, Richmond Management, Others
  • Sai Advantium: $20 million from MPM Capital
  • Cleartrip: $18.5 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Others
  • Deeya Energy: $15 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, BlueRun, NEA, Others
  • Soham Renewable Energy: $15 million from DE Shaw

For details on the top ten deals, see the press release (link above). The deal sizes for the top ten deals do indicate that there is an inclination for Series B or later stage deals. Still, it will be comforting to see that the appetite for young Indian companies among investors has not diminished, despite a slowing market in the US. Also interesting to note is the presence of investors such as DE Shaw and IDFC Private Equity on the list of venture deals. Of course, in India, which is predominantly a growth market, the lines between venture capital and private equity are often blurred.

TiE-Canaan Entrepreneurial Challenge

Update: TiE-Canaan announced the winners of its entrepreneurial challenge on Saturday — Equitas, Druvaa and iKen. More details here.

The TiE-Canaan Entrepreneurial Challenge 2008 finalists have been in the public domain for some time. Three winners will be chosen out of the eight finalists. Here’s a quick look at some of them:

Equitas Micro Finance India is a Chennai-based micro-finance company and serves the Tamil Nadu market. It appears to be a one-year old company and is targeting 1,80,000 members in its first year of operation. The founders come from NBFC backgrounds. Promoter and managing director PN Vasudevan was with Cholamandalam Investment & Finance.

11rupees is an online personal finance management company. Founder Anuj Gupta writes on his blog, “This started when my father gave me his list of stocks and accounts for me to put together in a spreadsheet for him to track his expenses. I was looking to find an easy way for him to track his finances and not update spreadsheets everytime. When I didn’t find anything, I decided to start this website.”

iKen Solutions is an IIT Bombay research spin-off in the area of intelligent business systems, according to the website.

HealthcareMagic is an online, one-stop shop to address all your healthcare needs — you can chat with or call a doctor, compare hospitals and products (medicines) and so on.

Raman Roy and Quatrro’s Bid For uncontested spaces

Early this week, Quatrro, the Raman Roy-founded specialist business process outsourcing firm, acquired UK gaming outsourcing company Babel Media. The size of the deal is estimated at $100-120 million but the company has not confirmed these numbers. This is Quatrro’s sixth acquisition since its inception in January 2006. An interesting aspect about the Babel deal is the presence of hedge fund DE Shaw as a co-investor. The New York-headquartered investor, which runs a private equity practice out of New Delhi led by former General Electric honcho Anil Chawla, has picked up minority stakes in Babel and Quatrro as part of the transaction. This, however, is not the first time that Quatrro has partnered with a private equity investor to execute an acquisition. In fact, said Roy over a telephonic chat from Delhi yesterday, this has been a consistent strategy all along. Excerpts:

Why did you get in a private equity partner on this deal?

We have always said that in our string of pearls strategy we would have multiple participants. I have various private equity guys in my other businesses also. DE Shaw is one of them. This has been a consistent strategy. We have not publicly disclosed the names. They are all participating at a business level. I wish I had the money for all the acquisitions that I have done…but I don’t. So we do a structured transaction in all the acquisitions that we have done and we own the majority of the company because management capability is the key differentiation that Quatrro brings to the table.

Some deal size numbers have been floating around. Would that be the ballpark?

I can’t comment on deal size. But this is a leveraged transaction. There is a lot of debt involved. DE Shaw has taken a stake in Babel and a very small, single digit percentage, stake in Quatrro.

Has Quatrro’s founding model — incubate or acquire — evolved since? How do you size up the competition?

Our model was not to incubate or acquire…our model was to get into what we call uncontested spaces. Within those spaces we identified some areas that could be built organically, some where acquisitions were worthwhile and the some where we would initiate the business organically and then do an acquisition. For instance, our mortgage and accounting businesses. Both were initiated organically and when we came to a particular stage, we did an acquisition. The spaces that we have chosen, the more established companies have not even entered. They may come in because they find it profitable, seeing what we are doing, but right now we play in uncontested marketplaces. There is no competition. Think about it. In gaming, nobody is in that space. We have 1,500 customers, mid-market and small companies, for whom we do accounting and we use less than 600 people. We are far ahead of what we had projected.

How active are you as an angel investor (Roy is a founding member of the Indian Angel Network)?

Out of the seven investments we’ve made, I’m a co-investor in five. We set up Indian Angel Network because we saw that there is a need for funding much before the venture capital round. The so-called angel round, which was not available. But more important than the funding is the mentoring…when a person is trying to build a business he needs mentoring from someone who has done it before and can tell him that it is okay to stumble and make mistakes. That was our driver…we’ve created businesses, now we want to help other people do the same.

Photo Courtesy: Quatrro