Eating into VC’s pie

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: Ventures India said that it would start looking at the Indian market and according to its India head Samir Kumar, the fund was looking at making a total of 8-10 investments between $1-2 million within the next two years. Next came the $250 million venture capital fund from Intelin 2005.

In the same year, communication equipment major Cisco decided to have a corpus fund of $100 million in venture funding as part of its $1.1 billion investment plan for India.

Cisco has already invested $80 million with around $20 million in the investment pipeline. And now SAP Ventures is expected to fund country’s start-up tech ventures after its long presence in the US and European market since 1997. In the next one year, the company would invest in six Indian companies, says Jai Das, a partner in SAP Ventures. Though SAP has declined to reveal the corpus of the fund set aside for the Indian market, it is expected to make a total investment of around $30 million in six Indian ventures, going by the history of an average investment of $4-5 million in each venture by SAP in the US and European markets.

And these funding have borne fruit too. It has helped create companies who have considerably brightened up the Indian tech sky in the last few years. Companies from NIIT Ltd, Rediff.com, Subex,

Bharti Telesoft to Sasken Communication, Sify and MakeMyTrip.com got the funding support from the tech venture funds like Intel Capital and Cisco Ventures.

Rama Sreeramaneni who heads the India operations of Hellosoft, a company funded by three corporate venture funds—Acer Technology Ventures in the first round and Mitsui Venture and Intel Capital in the second round—looks at the investment by companies like Intel as a kind of endorsement. To them, association with Intel means the world’s largest processor company arranging meetings with the global clients, getting help in research and development and meeting best of the technologists in tech conferences.

“When there is an investment from a IT major like Intel, it means that as a product company, we are different from others. It is more than money—the association with a brand like Intel provides us with an opportunity to take our products to the global customers,” says Sreeramaneni.

Hellosoft creates both software and hardware IP for the communications sector and its customers include global names like BenQ, Cisco, Broadcom, Panasonic and Texas Instruments.