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IDG Ventures India and Erasmic Venture Fund together have invested $3.5 million in Perfint, a Chennai-based medical electronics company. IDG Ventures and early/seed stage fund Erasmic, both Bangalore-based, have invested $3 million and $500K, respectively. Perfint is founded by S Nandakumar, B D Vijaya and a team of healthcare device professionals who were earlier associated with GE Healthcare in India.
Perfint has developed PIGA, a high tech medical positioning device that can help in clinical applications such as biopsy and other soft tissue procedures. In technical terms, it is a tool positioner for Image Guided Minimally Invasive (IG-MI) procedures. They support applications such as fine needle aspiration (FNA), biopsy and RF Ablation (RFA) of small tumors in the lung and the abdomen. PIGA is expected to be launched in India in early 2008. PIGA is under clinical evaluation at this moment.
The various image guided interventions (IG-MI) are biopsy (IG diagnosis), radiation (IG therapy) and IG surgery. The global market for minimally invasive image-guided interventions is currently over $3 billion. However, currently only less than 15 per cent of all surgeries are performed using IG-MI approach.
“With increasing healthcare awareness and ever improving hospital infrastructure across the world, guided procedures for early stage cancer diagnosis, drug delivery etc, are estimated to grow from under 10-15 per cent of total procedures done today to about 50-60 per cent by 2010. That presents a huge opportunity for devices such as PIGA” said Sudhir Sethi, Chairman and founding managing director of IDG Ventures India.
The company plans to target the emerging markets initially and will look at entering the US markets in 2009, according to S. Nandakumar, co-founder and CEO of Perfint. IDG's Sudhir Sethi and Ranjith Menon, and Erasmic's Subrata Mitra will join the board of Perfint.
IDG Ventures has been making several high tech investments in India. Its most recent investment was 3D Solid compression Pvt Ltd, a 3D visualisation startup incubated at Stanford University and Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Its other investments include retail analytics firm Manthan Software Services, B2C online gaming company Kreeda Games, Sasken Communications spin-out Connect M Technology Solutions, and network security company iViz.

Mobile content company Nazara Technologies is set to announce its second round of funding of $7 million early next month, reports DNA. This funding has been in the works for some time. According to the report, the existing investor Sequoia Capital India (it invested $1.5 million in 2006) is also expected to take part in the new round, besides an unnamed overseas venture capital fund. Nazara has mobile content rights to cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, besides developing and aggregating entertainment and gaming content. The company is founded by Nitish Mittersain.
Mobile content business is not so much in fashion since they are still left with an unfavourably disproportionate revenue share vis-a-vis the telecom operator. The last funding in the business was that of Norwest Venture Capital and Nexus India Capital's in Mobile2Win sometime last year. Another mobile content company Mauj, which is also funded by Sequoia ($10 million), has not landed second round, while its parent People Interactive (owner of Shaadi.com) is believed to have closed a deal with Goldman Sachs.
However, investors are not hesitant to back companies that manage the mobile value added services infrastructure (as against content aggregation) such as OnMobile (going in for an IPO) and one97 Communications (landed funding from SAIF Partners and Silicon Valley Bank).

Reliance Technology Ventures Ltd (RTVL), the corporate venture capital arm of Anil Ambani's Reliance ADA Group, has made an undisclosed investment in Stoke, Inc, a US-based company that enables telecom operators to deliver concurrent, multimedia subscriber experiences such as video, music, gaming, location, voice and data services across fixed, cellular, Wi-Fi and WiMAX access networks.
The co-investors of RTVL in the deal include existing investors such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sequoia Capital, Integral Capital Partners and DAG Ventures. RTVL seems to be focusing on the US telecom startups. This is the second investment of RTVL, an 100 per cent subsidiary of Reliance Capital, in the US in the telecom space. It had recently led a $10 million round in E-Band Communications, a US-based company that makes ultra-high capacity wireless communications systems for the 70/80 GHz E-band spectrum. Besides this, RTVL had played a major role in Reliance Communications’ acquisition of Yipes for $300 million early this year. It also advised R-ADAG in its investment in travel portal Yatra.com.
Including this round, Santa Clara, California-based Stoke (founded by Indian Vikash Verma) has now received more than $50 million in funding.

Related:
Reliance Technology Ventures Leads Series B Round In US-based E-Band

This is an interesting development. Mumbai-based venture capital firm Nexus India Capital has bought out the remaining companies in the portfolio of eVentures India, a troubled VC fund which shut shop in 2003, reports Mint. eVentures was promoted by Japan's SoftBank Corp. and US-based News Corp. The common link between eVentures and Nexus India is Sandeep Singhal. Singhal was earlier a partner with eVentures, while he is currently the co-founder and Managing Director of Nexus.
According to Mint, Nexus has acquired eVentures’ stake in four companies - Netmagic Solutions (hosting and datacentres), Connecturf India (an online advertising), Contests2Win.com (an online contests company) and Games2Win (an online gaming company recently started by Alok Kejriwal of Contests2win; Clearstone Venture Partners has invested $5 million in it).
Nexus has apparently bought the stakes at eVentures's cost price. Nexus had earlier bought eVentures’ stake in mobile services company Mobile2Win India Pvt. Ltd in 2006 (Norwest Venture Capital had also put in money in this company then). Nexus, co-founded by Singhal, Suvir Sujan of ex-Baazee and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Naren Gupta, currently manages a $100 million fund.
At one time, eVentures had a portfolio of 14 companies, totalling an investment of $43 million, says Mint. Some six of them were either shut down or sold back to promoters. Singhal had personally bought eVentures' stake in online travel company MakeMyTrip, which he flipped to SAIF Partners. It exited some companies like CustomerAsset.com (acquired by ICICI OneSource), Integma Holdings (acquired by Emptoris, Inc.) and Mentorix Technologies Inc. (acquired by Lionbridge Technologies Inc.).
This is the first time one VC fund buying another VC's portfolio lock stock and barrel. However, secondary transactions have happened in the Indian private equity market earlier. Last year, Coller Capital bought out the stakes of some of the limited partners in ICICI Venture India Advantage Fund for $35 million. Some of the limited partners in UTI Ventures have also sold their stakes to other investors at a higher price. And there has been a merger too - WestBridge Capital Partners with Sequoia Capital to form Sequoia Capital India.

Info Edge India Ltd, the owners of Naukri.com, is having its board meeting today to consider raising funds. In an announcement to the stock exchanges, the company said that the meting is held to "discuss raising of capital through various available mechanisms in India and overseas". It's not clear what they will use the capital for. Interestingly, Naukri had raised Rs 174 crore last year via an IPO, and good chunk of it is invested for treasury operations. The company had set apart of Rs 30 crore for M&As and investments. The company is backed by Sherpalo and Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers. ICICI Venture had exited Naukri completely through secondary market transactions to Fidelity Fund and others.
Naukri has also informed the stock exchanges that it had invested $500K in an Indian education portal StudyPlaces.com Inc, USA. The investment is done by a Mauritius based subsidiary of Info Edge. The company's total commitment in StudyPlaces is said to be $1 million.

Silicon Valley venture capital fund Lightspeed Venture Partners is internationally a tech focused investment firm. In India, it may slightly change the tack in order to be opportunistic as far as investments are concerned. The firm will make about half of its future investments in India in non-tech businesses, according to the firm's managing director in India, Srini Vudayagiri.
He told Mint: “ 40–50% of our investments in India will now be diverted to the non-tech sectors. This has been prompted by local market needs. We will mainly invest in consumer-driven sectors and allied infrastructure-led companies." The firm, which is currently investing out of its $480 million global fund raised in 2005, is in the process of raising a new global fund, and a quarter of it may be invested in India.
Lightspeed has invested (or co-invested) more than $50 million in five Indian companies, which include Four Interactive Pvt. Ltd (the owner of local information website AskLaila), TutorVista, Mercantila, Virsa Software and Nexus Capital.
According to Vudayagiri, Lightspeed would explore investment opportunities in the fields of marketing and media, education, health care and life sciences, and financial services, says the Mint report. They are also interested in companies associated with metal handling, logistics and component supplies.

IDG Ventures India, the Bangalore-based early stage technology venture capital fund, has made an undisclosed investment in a technology startup incubated by Stanford University and the city-based Indian Institute of Science (IISc). The company - 3D Solid compression Pvt Ltd (3DSoC) - was co-founded by Fritz Prinz (a Professor in Stanford), B Gurumoorthy (a professor in IISc), Krishnan Ramaswami and K K Venkatraman.
3DSoC is in the 3D content creation and visualisation space. It has developed a patented technology called VIS (Virtual Interactive Solid), which is a concise and lightweight 3D representation, comprising of geometry, text, sound, animation, textures and interaction.
The company claims that the concise nature of the representation makes it very attractive for digital transmission over the network. The value proposition lies in its ability to compress models significantly and allow for interaction at the same time. VIS will find applications in the 3D publishing and visualization space across industries such as automotive, aerospace, heavy equipment manufacturing, marine and offshore drilling, and healthcare to create electronic catalogues, manuals and digital mockups. It can also used in the education, media & entertainment industry to create content in the rich Internet applications space both for recreational and training purposes.
"It is our belief that 3D technology adoption forms the next wave of innovation in digital distribution of content. Whether it be 3D GUI's, rich internet applications, a Second Life like platform or global engineering digital supply chains, our investment in 3D Solid compression is well positioned to ride this wave," Sudhir Sethi, Chairman & Managing Director, IDG Ventures India, said in a statement.
The company's customers in India include some major players in the automotive and engineering verticals who see benefits in leveraging 3D product data in both marketing and the MRO side of the business, due to the highly compressed nature of the files, the release adds.
IDG Ventures India's Sethi and investment advisor Hemir Doshi will join the Board of Directors of 3DSoC. This is the fifth investment of IDG Ventures in India. IDG Ventures India, which has a $150 million fund, has invested in companies like Manthan Software Services, Kreeda Games, Connect M Technology Solutions, and iViz.

Techfarm Ventures, a US-based incubator and early stage investor in technology companies, has taken over Hyderabad-based IChip Technologies, a company that has developed a device that can double up as a TV and a PC.
Gordon Campbell, Chief Executive Officer of Techfarm, is also the CEO and Co-founder of Personal Web (PW) Systems, a company incorporated in the US. IChip, which has developed @Box, will now become a subsidiary of PWSystems. The financial terms of the deal are not known, however, Campbell told media that it would be "substantial". They plan to launch the product in India first and therefater in other countries.
This is the second investment in India by Techfarm Ventures. It had earlier invested in PortalPlayer, which went in for an IPO in 2004, and subsequently got bought out by nVIDIA in January 2007. Techfarm has earlier incubated more than a dozen companies such as the first Ethernet chip and graphics controller.

Xilinx, the $2-billion California-based programmable logic chips and services company, is looking at investing in India from its $75-million Asia Pacific Technology Venture Capital Fund. The corporate venture arm of Xilinx plans to invest up to $10 million in Indian companies from the fund, the company's senior director, vertical markets and partnerships, Krishna Rangasayee told The Economic Times. Xilinx has already identified Noida-based CG CoreELas the first recipient of the fund. Xilinx is also betting big on the Indian aviation, space, defence, Wimax, IPTV and mobile markets.

Mentor Partners, the Bangalore-based early-stage venture capital advisory firm, has been working with startups for the last two years. The firm usually draws into the purses of a group of individual investors whenever an investment opportunity comes up. But not having a fund of your own may not be a great idea if your full time job is to mentor startups and scout for good investment opportunities.
Mentor Partners is now planning to raise its first fund of $30-50 million in the next six to nine months, reports The Economic Times, quoting Mentor Partners managing director Ravi Narayan. Initially, it will be focused on Indian market but the funds can be used for investing in other Asian markets like Singapore and Malaysia.
Formed in December 2005, Mentor has invested in 7 companies including Ilantus Technologies, Ugenie, Bubble Motion, Atlantis Computing, atOnePlace.com and Elina Networks. It is now in the process of incubating inhouse, a firm focused on mentoring SMEs using an IT-enabled platform.
Currently there are few funds targeting the early stage investment opportunities. They include Seed Fund ($10 million), Erasmic Fund, and VentureEast Tenet Fund II.