| The fund, with its offices in Mumbai and Bangalore, is backed by Pravin Gandhi and Bharati Jacob, who were earlier associated with Infinity Ventures, and Mahesh Murthy, chief executive officer of Mumbai-based search engine marketing firm Pinstorm. |
| It had made 7 investments, including in automotive portal Carwale, bus ticketing service Redbus and publishing house AgencyFAQs, since its inception in November 2006. |
| "Seedfund aims at investing in 12 to 15 companies. With 7 investments so far, we are at the half-way mark currently. We continue to see business plans every month, from which we hope to find out our next 5 to 7 investee companies. We are confident of making the rest of our planned investments in 2008," Mahesh Murthy, managing partner, Seedfund, told Business Standard. |
| He, however, declined to disclose the name of the companies that Seedfund intends to invest in, and their geographies. |
| Seedfund, which is structured with a life of up to nine years, typically infuses between Rs 1 crore and Rs 6 crore, and holds minority stakes of between 15 per cent and 40 per cent in the investees. |
| Stating that the fund invests in firms that have an ability to quickly become leaders in their respective niches, Murthy said they had no particular bias by sector or by vertical. |
| "We, however, have been disappointed by the lack of viable businesses using mobile VAS (value-added services). Hence, we will continue to remain focused on consumer-facing businesses, especially those that use the Internet, mobile or other technologies to help them service their customers better, and grow faster," he added. |
| According to Murthy, the company has no plans to increase the fund's corpus. "Seedfund may look at raising another fund once its current investment goals with the existing corpus are achieved," he said, without sharing further details. |
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