**OT** Reuters to fund Indian start-ups
(Friday, March 17, 2000)
Our Corporate Bureau in New Delhi
Information and news group giant, Reuters, will offer venture capital funding in India, routing funds into the country through its œ438 million overseas venture capital fund, Greenhouse fund.
It plans to pick up stakes of 5 to 10 per cent in Indian technology startups. "We plan a minority investment programme for a range of startup technology companies," said Jan Coos Geesink, managing director, Reuters Information, and senior company officer, Reuters Asia-Pacific, here yesterday. He, however, did not specify the size of the India-specific allocations.
According to Asoka Markandu, marketing manager, Reuters India Ltd, Reuters does not need to seek a separate clearance for venture capital funding in India.
Greenhouse fund has decided to invest in sectors like navigation providers on the Net, content providers, Internet security companies and companies that have developed software for transaction flows.
The relaxation of norms for the venture capital funds in the Union budget has made India a very lucrative market to put funds into, Geesink specified.
"Reuters supplies the global financial markets and news media with the widest range of information and is looking for partners to draw synergy from the joint venture," he said. He added, "Reuters is not merely a financial investor but looks for technologies or professional business information that it can use with its own products."
Reuters has proposed to spend œ500 million globally in future to migrate its core business to an Internet-based model.
Till date, Reuters has held stakes in five such companies, quoted on Nasdaq in the US.
The quoted US investments by the fund are the Internet portal infoseek.com, search engine Yahoo.com, Internet sports information service sportsline.com, certification authority for the public Internet verisign.com and Internet and intranet consulting, contracting and implementing e-commerce site usweb.com
Apart from the listed investments, the unquoted investments include persistence.com; a software to accelerate transaction processing; aurigin.com for patents database and navigation tools; ventureone.com; a database of venture funded companies; and decurve.co.uk, a decision support, financial modeling and valuation software for corporates.
Reuters recently tied up with Aether Systems Inc, a US based leader in wireless technologies to set up a new,independently managed company to develop and provide wireless data applications in Europe,initially focusing on financial markets.
The fund has its presence since 1994 in the US and European markets and now plans to go global and has targeted Asia-Pacific region including Japan, Hongkong, Singapore and India.
-BS |
