StartupCentral

New Delhi-based mobile value added services (VAS) company One97 Communications has teamed up with private equity firm SAIF Partners to launch the One97 Mobility Fund, which will invest in seed and early-to-growth stage mobile VAS companies. The fund will have a $100 million corpus, contributed by the two partners. It will invest anywhere between $50,000 and $5 million per startup.

One97 has earlier incubated two mobile VAS startups — Oorja Mobile Services and TenCube on its own. SAIF Partners, incidentally, is also the largest institutional investor in One97. It currently holds 41 per cent and has invested $20 million in the company so far, according to this VC Circle report. The private equity firm, reportedly, increased its stake by an additional 10 per cent just shortly after the company announced plans to go public this year with a Rs 120 crore offer. See the draft red herring prospectus filed with the Indian markets regulator SEBI here. Other investors in the company include Intel Capital and Silicon Valley Bank.

Founded in 2000 by 31-year old Vijay Shekhar Sharma, One97′s clients include Bharti Airtel, Idea Cellular and Vodafone. Read more at the company’s blog.

(Source: Press Release)

Disclosed venture capital investments in 2009, by my count, stood at just under $150 million. The total number of deals announced was 59, out of which 28 did not disclose the investment amount.

This is as per numbers collated from deals reported by various media and announced in press releases. Not all these deals are verified and in many cases the announced/ committed money will flow into the respective companies in tranches over an extended period. The actual total investment, therefore, would be much lower.

There are other numbers floating around as well. Venture Intelligence puts investments till November at $332 million across 68 deals, against $839 million and 155 deals for the full year 2008.

Here are our key numbers from 2009: Read the full story