**OT** Chrysalis Capital to fund 10 more companies
Vipin Kumar
NEW DELHI, March 22
CHRYSALIS Capital will finance 10 more companies in the current year, a top company official has said.
" We have already funded five companies. Our plan is to go in for another 10 companies this year to take the list to 15 investments per year," Mr. Raj Kondur, Director of the fund, told Business Line here.
Chrysalis has hitherto made investments in four dotcoms- Broadcastindia.com, BaaZee.com, Egurucool.com and ZipAhead.com. On Thursday it announced its fifth and the largest investment till date, in Spectramind Ltd of Mr. Raman Roy.
The company has put in Rs. 8 crores in Broadcastindia.com and Rs. 10 crores each in BaaZee.com and Egurucool.com. While the investment in Zipahead.com is Rs. 20 crores, the funding for Spectramind has not been revealed as yet.
Mr. Kondur said the proposed investments would come through in the near future. "It will be much earlier than even we expect," he said.
Chrysalis has a corpus of about $65 millions, pooled in by Stanford University, Government of Singapore, Microsoft Corporation, Bank of Madura and people such as Mr. Vinod Dham (who ran Intel's Pentium project), Citigroup's Co-chief Executive- CEO and President of Citibank, Mr. Victor J. Menezes, and the Chairman of Goldman Sachs, Mr. Hank Paulson.
Other investors in Chrysalis include Mr. Steve Friedman, former Chairman of Goldman Sachs, Mr. K. B. Chandrashekhar of Exodus and Mr. Sanjeev Sidhu of i2 Technologies.
Chrysalis expects to utilise 65-70 per cent of the corpus in two years before going for a second round of funding. The average investment the fund makes per company will be $2-5 million.
-The Hindu Business Line |
