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Strategies & Market Trends : India Coffee House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (10116)	12/19/1999 9:14:00 PM
From: Mohan Marette	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12475

'Techspan plans Nasdaq listing' Techspan Inc techspan.com Board of Directors Arjun Malhotra, Chairman and CEO Atul Kapur, Goldman Sachs Randy Blumenthal, Goldman Sachs Som Das, Walden International Investment Group Subhash Arora, Private Investor ======================= N Shivapriya(IE) MUMBAI, DEC 19: Techspan Inc, the hi-profile start-up founded by Arjun Malhotra of HCL fame, is likely to list on the Nasdaq in 2000. The one-year old firm, in the business of servicing technology needs of dot.com companies, is likely to close the fiscal with a revenue of $ 14 million. Top company officials ruled out going for a second round of funding before the IPO. Currently, Goldman Sachs and Walden International together hold around 50 per cent equity in the firm with Goldman Sachs being the majority shareholder. The company is targeting a market capitalisation of $ 1 billion by 2002. The firm has also made its first equity investment in a start-up client, a US-based print brokerage firm. Techspan is making its system web-based and has taken a token stake in the company. "The investment is very small what a middle management person would get as options," managing partner and chief technology officer Curt Terwilliger told The Indian Express. More such investments are to follow in the next couple ofmonths. These investments will not be in the nature of venture capital funding but more on the lines of a partnership. "We have developed a model to invest in these companies. But very clearly it will only be after they have been through funding we are not in the venture capital business," Terwilliger said. Some of Techspan's clients are high-profile start-ups like Webvan and even a small stake in such companies could turn out to be very profitable. For the fiscal ending December 2000 the firm has projected a revenue of $ 44 million over 50 per cent of which will come from dot.com companies. Techspan does software development for these firms through onshore software exports, popularly called bodyshopping. However, unlike typical bodyshoppers which only do export of people, all employees are on the company payroll and rewarded with stock options. The expertise gained from projects will also be used to build utilities and fine tune processes for reducing costs and implementation time, managing partner(eastern operations) Sandeep Sahai said. The firm invested a whopping $ 1 million in building internal information systems during 1999. Currently, the firm, headquarted at California, is doubling its employee strength from 215 to 500 to staff its offshore development centre at Noida. All employees are eligible for stock options. Their stake in the company is currently close to 10 per cent. The core group of promoters most of them former HCL employees including Malhotra hold 30 per cent.