The `serial entrepreneur'-as he calls himself-is on the prowl. He is looking for companies with killer products, good people, big opportunity and above all real fire in the belly. Prakash Bhalerao has an unsatiable appetite: he has fingers in 45 pies and every other week there is some company knocking at his doors. "I can handle only two to three companies a year," says this angel investor and VC from Silicon Valley.At the moment he is lavishing attention on Concio Inc and its Indian operations, Concio Technologies Pvt Ltd. Most of the components are in place at Concio and he wants to stitch up the fundamentals together before it can go for an IPO in the US. "I want to put the management in place and get a couple of investors from Wall Street interested before going to the market," says Bhalerao.
To this end Bhalerao has successfully weaned away Achyut S Godbole from L&TIT Limited. Godbole will be at the helm at Concio Technologies and his mandate would be to ramp up the Indian operations at a rapid pace. Bhalerao was in Pune on Wednesday to launch Concio's development facility in Pune. An investment of around $ 5-8 million has been earmarked and Concio is aggressively looking at the acquisition route to expand in India. "We will be gravitating towards financial services and telecom and will be looking for companies with domain expertise in these areas" says Bhalerao.
Godbole indicates that talks are on at the moment with companies and an announcement will be made soon. To start with Concio's Pune facility will have around 150 professionals while the HQ will be in Mumbai, Godbole said.
Europe is the next destination for Concio to be followed by Japan and Australia.
Copyright © 2000 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.