Ant Factory has invested $450,000 in the venture, which is its first investment in India. Indegene.com, a company promoted by a couple of entreprenuers with medical degrees followed up with MBA degrees from IIM Ahmedabad, will function as a B2B platform for hospitals and various other health service providers.

Unwilling to disclose details, Rajiv Sahney of Ant Factory says "we are still working out the precise nature of services that the site will provide hospitals and others and its too early to comment".

The company has been promoted by medical and management professionals Rajesh Nair and Rohit Bhojraj alongwith a few friends which includes a former employee of Infosys.

Ant Factory is a UK based company with an investible corpus of about $550 million. While $200 million is a corpus that the company maintains in terms of a fund, the remainder comes in the form of line credit from companies like financial institution JH Whitney, Citicorp Venture Fund, CVC Capital Partners, and Insurance major Allianz.

The company was instituted in September 99 and set up base in India two months ago. Ant Factory currently operates in several European countries and is setting up operations in Israel, Japan, Mexico, Argentina and Brazil according to Sahney.

"In India, our investment strategy involves two kinds of companies, one is technology companies which are creating technology which is a first the world over and the other kind of company is one which is answering a need for the Indian market, mostly in the B2B space," says Sahney.

The company also plans to come in at the early stages of funding. "We look at ourselves as value catalysts for the new economy," says Sahney, "apart from capital we want to bring managerial depth to the table" he adds. Sahney wants to exploit the company's skill sets to the fullest when it comes to the investee companies. These include investment banking skills, general management, technology, marketing, HR and consulting skills.