Known for having made Junglee.com into a successfully company within two years, after which it was acquired by Amazon.com last year, Mathur resigned from Amazon recently to work on his new start-up. His eyes light up talking about what he calls his new $2.5-million passion.

"The thrill for me lies in doing new things. I will remain a shareholder in Amazon for a long time, but the raw thrill of being in a start-up is unmatchable," he says.

Mathur has partnered with three University of Stanford researchers and ex-IIT students in the new venture. Intel has a five per cent stake in the 10-people company which is yet to be named and is likely to be launched early next year. The site is likely to be an intelligent website search engine.

"It is in the space of making sense of the Web. There are 50 million websites and all kinds of activities.It will help people know how to deal with the Web as it is still not going to be easy to use the Web for a long time," he says.

Mathur says he would love to take it public if the start-up clicks and is even open to the idea of getting it listed on Indian stock exchanges. "I can't say why, but the idea appeals me a lot. Who knows, we will also end up doing joint ventures in India later," says Mathur.

In addition to his own company, Mathur has also helped launch five other companies, three of them with Junglee.com co-founder Ram Shriram. Of these, uReach, eLance and Yodlee have just been launched, while xSpeed and TransCast are still in the development stage.

"Over the past few years, I met up with a lot of budding entrepreneurs who had dreams in their eyes. I have just invested and helped them," he says.Of the five, xSpeed makes chips for broadband services and has entered into a tie-up with AOL to push the DSL standard. Yodlee is in the business of giving a summary of all Web accounts of a user such asphone bill payment on the Web or e-trading of stocks. Of the five, Yodlee is the closest to being acquired.

TransCast facilitates auctioning through TV and can be an ideal e-auction site what with the popularity of Web TV growing fast. Another is eLance which brings together freelancers of various fields to one portal through which they can pick up assignments.

The fifth is uReach, a unified messaging portal which provides free e-mail along with free voice mail and is likely to receive corporate investment.Talking about his involvement with the homeland, Mathur says: "After I am done with the latest passion, I would like to build a true venture capital base in India and help entrepreneurs here. But as of now, I do not have time as I eat, drink and sleep my newest passion. I have to give birth to the Junglee sequel."