StartupCentral

Forbes reports that ace Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla is raising two new funds worth an aggregate $1 billion. One is a $250 million seed fund and the other, $750 million, is for later stage investments — read the report here. The report doesn’t say much about what exactly the two funds will invest in but, clean technology, which has been Khosla’s passion for most of this decade, is likely to be a big focus.

Khosla has been investing in startups from his own capital pool through Khosla Ventures for the last few years. In India, one of his early bets was SKS Microfinance, in which he led Small Industries Development Bank of India and others to invest Rs 11 crore ($2.5 million) in 2006. Khosla Ventures has a wide range in terms of investment ticket sizes (investment per company) from $100,000 to $20 million (or more) and particularly likes companies in the mobile, alternative energy and bio-refineries spaces. That should be a pretty good indicator of what Khosla’s new funds are going to invest in. No doubt that India will be on his radar. Read the full story

A venture capitalist dialed in from Bangalore this afternoon with a query about PayMate’s subscriber and transaction volume numbers. Reason: the Mumbai-based mobile payments startup has just landed $9 million in Series B funding from Mayfield Fund and Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, investing alongside Sherpalo Ventures. This takes the total money raised by the company so far to $14 million. Kleiner and Sherpalo are existing investors in Paymate — they had invested $5 million in the first round in 2006.

The company enables transactions on mobile phones and wireless devices and does so through partners such as Standard Chartered Bank, Tata Indicom and Kingfisher Airlines among others. Founders Ajay Adisheshann and Probir Roy started PayMate in 2006. The company was carved out of another startup, Coruscant Tec. This company, founded in 2003 by Adisheshann, develops applications and solutions for mobile and wireless devices, and in 2006 its payment platform was spun out to create PayMate.

Mobile payments is a hot investment niche with venture capitalists at the moment and has been for well over two years. The business potential of the segment is easily evident — over 200 million mobile users and counting. The segment got a big endorsement early this year with the entry of US mobile payments pioneer Obopay. There are a bunch of homegrown startups such as Jigrahak and mChek building their presence in the space and so far, attracting first round funding has not been a problem. But the segment is not without its challenges…read about some of them here.

What others are saying about the deal

• PayMate closes $9 million funding round (Medianama)
• PayMate raises $9 million second round funding (Business Standard)

Image Courtesy: PayMate