The firm is looking forward to tap technology start-ups in the India-US corridor in emerging areas such as cloud, artificial intelligence, virtual reality with a focus on solving business problems.
The enterprise technology focused venture capital firm, which was launched in 2014 technology industry biggies and former board members of Infosys T V Mohandas Pai, V Balakrishnan, Girish Paranjpe, former chief executive of Wipro Ltd and Deepak Ghaisas, co-founder of I-flex Solutions, is likely to launch the fund for offshore investment this April.
Exfinity has raised Rs 425 crore in two rounds for the Indian start-ups that have used emerging technologies such as cloud, artificial intelligence, mobility, data analytics, virtual reality, IoT to solve problems in consumer marketplace and aggregation.
“We are now looking at an offshore fund worth $150-200 million because with Indian Rupee fund we cannot invest outside India. For any enterprise-technology idea we can only invest up to 25 percent and it lacks flexibility too. We believe the Indo-US corridor is the best corridor to invest since a lot of ideas get incorporated in the US but they are developed in India,” V Balakrishnan, chairman at Exfinity Ventures, told Business Standard in an interview.
The firm has invested in 13 companies through the initial two funds. “The first fund is fully invested in 9 companies, while 4 companies have been funded so far with the second corpus,” said Balakrishnan.
Exfinity wants to capture the technology innovation happening in the Silicon Valley too. “We do not want to miss any opportunity. We have applied for it with Mauritius (regulators). The approval should come by March end or April and then we can launch it. After launch, it will take 8-10 months to close.”
The digital technology focused firm has emphasised on enterprise-technology as it believes the business-to-consumer segment is still not mature in the country and easy access to funds have often allowed some of the start-ups to exploit the pricing.
“With innovations in the business-to-consumer segment in India, the biggest problem is everyone wants to become bigger in this space so that they can become a monopoly and control the price. The problem comes with competition, they become aggressive and cut each other to become big. Access to easy fund also allows them exploit the industry,” said Balakrishnan.
More money to flow
Raised first corpus worth Rs 125 crore
In the second phase, Exfinity raised Rs 300 crore in So far, it invested in 13 firms in digital technology solutions
Going forward, it will focus on India-US corridor for investment
Key focus is on technologies that solve problems in B2B space
Source: Business-Standard