The company had received $1.75 million in freshly issued stocks from VC fund Acquavit last September, which later got acquired by Rupert Murdoch and PK Mittal-promoted e-Ventures. The latter now holds close to 28 per cent equity in the company while the rest is with Manish Modi and his family.

When contacted, NetAcross chief operating officer Sanjay Jain confirmed that the company was in negotiations with certain VCs for raising between $7 million and $9 million, but said nothing had been finalised yet and the company was yet to appoint a firm for evaluation. He also declined to comment on whether e-Ventures would go for a second tranche of funding in NetAcross.

Sources said, however, that the company was in advanced state of talks with another VC and the announcement was likely by April-end. Modi was not available for comment.

Three-year-old NetAcross has chalked out plans to set up two new technical centres in addition to the Delhi centre. The first one will be located either in Bangalore or Hyderabad and will have a 250-people team. The second will be opened in Mumbai for a niche development work with a small 50-member team. Both are expected to be functional by May 2000.

It is also eager to acquire a few `small technology or creative workshop' like firms in Singapore, Australia and UK through an all-cash or stock swap deal to achieve inorganic growth, according to Jain. It plans to hand over the reigns of those companies to their erstwhile management and let them function as strategic business units.

NetAcross itself has gone in for an organisational restructuring from a hierarchical set-up to a professional partnership kind of structure usually practiced by the management consultancies.

At the helm is a partnership committee which runs the company. It is headed by managing partner and MD Manish Modi, who was earlier designated as MD and CEO.

The five-member committee comprises a chief financial officer, chief knowledge officer, chief technology officer and a chief people officer. The latter three newly-created posts are still to be filled. On the business side, the structure has been divided among strategy, technical and creative pyramids, each of which can be headed by a partner in different locations.