An IT industry veteran, who sold one of India?s first infrastructure services companies to two Fortune 50 firms, is now incubating and mentoring companies started by his former employees.
Sudhir Sarma founded network integration company Network Solutions in 1993 and sold a part of the business to Intel in 2001 and then in entirety to IBM in 2005. He has put together a corpus of about $3 million to back start-ups. This corpus may be extended with external investment from other funds and private investors in the future.
His holding company Future IP has already incubated four firms, many of whose employees and top management all come from Network Solutions ? JaMocha Technologies, Serviceberry Technologies, Eco Positive Solutions and Intrago Corporation. The companies are focused around IT and green technologies.
Future IP holds 60% equity in these companies and has assigned the rest to the management and its employees. Upon meeting of certain milestones, additional equity will be transferred back to the companies, Sarma, also the CEO of Future IP, told FE.
Bangalore-based JaMocha is a technology and solutions engineering firm that develops and sells products in the energy management, infrastructure management and productivity management segments. All the products are based on its own platform, NetValence. JaMocha also specialises in creating custom solutions in these segments. Revenues for the firm have just started flowing and it would be cash positive in a few months, Sarma said.
Serviceberry, based out of Mumbai, is a digital infrastructure, business service management and IT transformation enabler. Serviceberry?s expertise in Business Service Management (BSM) and IT Service Management (ITSM) was recognised when it won the best HP Software Partner of the year award in 2009, the first year of its operations. The firm has 40 employees, had revenues of Rs 5 crore in the first year of operations, is cash positive, and is executing projects in India and West Asia.
Eco Positive is in the fast growing ?sustainable living? space and is working on energy conservation, renewable energy and waste re-cycling. Eco Positive has created a micro -biodigester that takes in kitchen waste to create bio gas.
?Every company under the Future IP umbrella operates independently. We are more than a holding company. We are creating an ecosystem where all the group companies can leverage the strengths of each other,? Sarma said. Although the majority of Future IP?s current investments are in technology firms as of now, the firm is looking across sectors now.