Indian Americans set up seed fund
By agencies   |   Wednesday, 31 May 2006, 19:30 IST
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NEW DELHI: A group of Indian American entrepreneurs led by Pravin Gandhi has set up funds for investing into Indian startup firms. The latest VC to rope in prominent Indian Americans from Silicon Valley as limited partners is the Seed Fund set up by the team of Pravin Gandhi, general partner at Infinity Ventures, Mahesh Murthy, founder of Geodesic and Bharati Jacob, investing principal at Infinity Ventures. While the three general partners are based in Mumbai and Bangalore, their list of limited partners runs like a who’s who of Silicon Valley’s Indian techies. They have roped in individual investors like Kanwal Rekhi, who has created many successful entrepreneurs besides being one himself in Silicon Valley; Ashok Narasimhan, chairman, CEO & co-founder of July Systems who has founded and built billion-dollar ventures; Naren Gupta, former CEO of WindRiver Systems and Integrated Systems; Sridhar Iyengar, President of TiE, Silicon Valley and former partner in charge of KPMG’s emerging business practice; KB Chandrasekhar, chairman e4e and co-founder CEO, and chairman of JamCracker and BV Jagadeesh, group VP and GM at Citrix whose company NetScaler was acquired last year. Gandhi, Seed Fund’s Partner said, “Seed Fund is an early stage feeder the concept of which doesn’t yet exist in India. It’s a $15 million fund and we are looking at investing smaller amounts of between $250,000-0.8 million in seed deals over two-year period.” He also said it will provide advisory mentoring from entrepreneurs with U.S.-India experience. They have roped in $2.2 million individual commitments from entrepreneurs of Indian origin for the fund.

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