Battery Ventures to invest up to $105 mn in 3 tech firms

Prachi Verma / New Delhi

Battery Ventures, a venture capital (VC) firm with funds to the tune of $1 billion under its management, is in the final stage of discussions with three Indian companies located in Bangalore and Chennai. The VC firm is looking at investing anywhere up to $35 million in each of these companies, once the evaluation is completed.

“I cannot mention specific companies but we are looking at firms that provide outsourced service for very specialised (and high-value) functions. We are a lot more interested in a company that provides outsourced chip design or specialised marketing analysis versus traditional call centre firms,” Battery Ventures senior associate Madhu Tadokonda said.

The companies under evaluation are in the space of analytics, business process outsourcing (BPO) in financial services and chip designing. “It will be hard to invest in companies that do not have operations in India. This will turn out to be too expensive for these companies and we are helping out these companies to look at the India part through outsourcing,” Tadikonda said.

As part of its cautious strategy, Battery Ventures is currently on the look out for an Indian VC to identify prospects and co-invest in the companies, Tadikonda said.

Battery Ventures is currently handling a corpus of $1 billion. “We have close to $2 billion in total committed capital. We are highly committed to invest in India and China and the focus on these countries is likely to rise in the coming years. Our investments in India-related companies is likely to be firmed up in the next six months,” he said.

Battery Ventures is focused on investing in technology companies at all stages of growth with a team of over 30 experienced investment professionals.

The firm has invested in over 160 technology companies worldwide across the communications, software, infrastructure, and media and content industries.

—The Financial Express