VCCircle

Norwest Venture Partners has raised a new fund of $650 million mainly targeting investments in India, Israel and the US. In India, the fund will basically target online and mobile companies. With this fund, NVP has more than $2.5 billion under its management. This is the tenth fund of NVP, and follows the $400 million NVP IX Fund that closed in late 2001.

"This fund will enable NVP to enter a new phase of growth. The size of NVP X is a testament to our belief in the potential of emerging markets in US and India," NVP managing partner Promod Haque (right) said.

The other key decisions are that NVP has promoted Robert Abbott, Jeffrey Crowe, Vab Goel, Jim Lussier and Venkat Mohan to the position of general partner.

VentureWire reports: Norwest partners have been travelling to India every couple months to establish strong ties in various industries and in the entrepreneur community. The firm also recently made a few investments in companies based in India for the first time. It previously backed businesses with presence in India, but not based there...Due to its global focus, the new fund is more than 50% bigger than Fund IX, which raised $400 million in 2001. But even while obviously stressing the global push, Norwest is not being definite on either the number of deals it will pursue nor the time its team will dedicate to foreign deals.

"What we don't want is to have someone dedicated to solely doing a deal in China or India or wherever, and then they're all by themselves," said Haque. The firm will probably hire full time staff in India eventually, Haque said, but for now the partners will lay the groundwork themselves. [Source: Press release; Via ContentSutra]