Mumbai: Walden International, a leading global venture capital firm, has announced the closing of its most recent fund - Pacven Walden Ventures V. This will incorporate parallel funds which will operate under a single entity - Pacven V.The size of the fund stands at $1 billion. "About a third of the fund will be invested in the US, a third in Asia and one third in Hybrid companies", explains Mr Sudhir Sethi who heads Walden International's operations in India.
The investors in Pacven V include Adaptec, AOL Time Warner Ventures, CSFB, DBS Bank, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, GIC Special Investments, Sumitomo and Temasek Holdings among others.
Walden International has invested in a total of 15 `Indiacentric' companies from its previous funds Walden Nikko and Pacven IV. Eight of these were based in India.
About 95 per cent of the investors from Pacven IV have participated in Pacven V as well, according to Mr Sethi.
Explaining how the investment strategy will differ with the new fund, Mr Sethi said that the quantum of investment in individual companies will be much larger this time around. Effectively this means that while the fund will be investing in fewer companies, the deal size will be much larger. "The investments will range between $5 million and $25 million in a company as opposed to earlier when we were doing investments of even $1 million" says Mr Sethi. The minimum investment from Pacven V in a company will be $5 million.
The areas for investment are broadly divided into two categories - technology and life sciences. Technology is further divided into areas like optics, telecom, wireless, implementation services, electronics and B2B.Elaborating on the fund's strategy to maximise returns, Mr Sethi said that the investee companies will have to explore relevant markets in order to scale the business as rapidly as possible, "Indian companies will have to be brought to the US markets and the US companies to Asian markets" says Mr Sethi.
"For IT, 50 to 60 per cent of the market for almost any offering lies in the US, so Asian companies will have to address these markets in order to be able to scale. US companies, on the other hand, have started looking to markets in Asian countries to scale certain businesses like Wireless", he adds.
Mr Sethi expects to see the emergence of more companies which possess "knowledge-based assets" as far as Asia is concerned.
Copyright © 2001 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
