Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Nasscom floats a 100 cr VC fund for IT start-ups

In December 2005, Nasscom wanted the Union Government to set up a separate venture fund to fuel innovation in the software products space.

A year and a half later Nasscom is set to launch a Venture Fund, with a corpus of Rs.100 crs, along with Hyderabad-based ICICI Knowledge Park, an arm of the ICICI bank.

Disclosing this to CyberMedia News here, Rajdeep Sehrawat, vice president of Nasscom, said “We have earmarked Rs 100 crore to fund IT start-ups in India, which are involved in IP-creation. These companies could be anyone who is working on automotive electronics, wireless and broadband, life sciences, medical devices and the like.”

The venture fund is expected to be in place by October this year. The fund will be looking at disbursing seed capital or angel funding, which other venture capital firms hesitate to enter. It intends to finance early start-ups, in their ideation stage, as this is where the liquidity crunch is felt the most.

Such initiatives promise to offer a lot of opportunities to an entrepreneurial mind. One hopes to see more such initiatives being taken in the future.

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