NASSCOM - ICICI knowledge park fund announced

By siliconindia   |   Saturday, 12 January 2008, 17:29 IST
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Bangalore: The premier trade body of Indian IT industry, NASSCOM, has announced the NASSCOM - ICICI Knowledge Park Innovation Fund (NIIF) promoted in collaboration with ICICI Knowledge Park. Other anchor investors in NIIF are Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Bharti Airtel. First of its kind initiative by NASSCOM and the ICICI Knowledge Park, the aim of NIIF is to provide seed stage investments in order to promote Intellectual Property (IP) driven innovations in emerging technologies. The fund will also encourage entrepreneurship and enable innovative startups to reach a stage of self-sustenance and growth. NIIF will operate as a separate commercial entity with the fund corpus being created through voluntary institutional contributions from firms representing the targeted investment areas of the fund. As of now, the sectors like wireless technologies, automotive infotronics, life sciences, energy conservation technologies and devices and medical devices have been identified as the key focus areas for investment by the fund. Speaking at the launch, Kiran Karnik, President, NASSCOM said, "While the larger firms have the necessary means to invest in innovation, startups and young firms in India often fail to scale up due to the lack of timely availability of seed capital. To address this serious issue of lack of seed capital, NASSCOM and ICICI Knowledge Park have decided to promote the NASSCOM-IKP Innovation fund." S. Ramadorai, MD and CEO, TCS said, "As an industry leader and investor in the NASSCOM-IKP innovation fund, TCS believes this is an important national initiative required to spur IP creation in emerging technologies and build an eco-system for innovation across the country." N Vaghul, Chairman, ICICI Group, said, "We need to ensure that impediments in the path of the young entrepreneurs are removed. The NASSCOM-ICICI Knowledge Park innovation fund addresses the key challenge of availability of seed capital and will hopefully provide a lighthouse effect."