Startup investor Kanwal Rekhi who officially launched his first India-focused venture capital fund, Inventus Capital with a $125 million corpus in Bangalore last week, spoke to peHUB yesterday in some detail about the fund, why it took longer than expected to raise and the importance of keeping deal sizes in India small — he speaks of $2 million per deal being the investment average. Read the interview by peHub’s Connie Loizos here.
I had noted earlier that two years seemed to be rather long getting this fund on the road. Rekhi, who founded Excelan (acquired by Novell) in Silicon Valley and subsequently went on to mentor/fund several successful Valley startups, including Exodus Communications and Rightworks, seems to have had his reasons. I find it interesting that he’s keeping deal sizes, small, implying that he’s going to try and bridge the critical gap in early-stage funding in India — Series A or the round of funding that follows seed funding. Of course, there is also a huge void in terms of the availability of seed funding itself, but Inventus’ approach is a good step towards connecting the missing links in the venture funding life-cycle.
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