Greylock Venture makes India debut

PRIVATE EQUITY WATCH

Greylock Venture Partners, the US-based venture capital firm with $2 billion under management, has made its debut in India.

The firm, which has backed globally renowned companies including Staples, RedHat and Facebook, made its first Indian investment in TechProcess (formerly BillJunction) as a growth stage venture funding. Greylock is currently investing from its $500 million global fund.

TechProcess was initially funded by ICICI Ventures in 2000. Over the years it developed expertise in transaction and payment processing services across a spectrum of industries in India.

Its services include processing transactions (debit & credit) for telecom, insurance, mutual funds, credit cards, banks and non-banking finance companies. In the insurance sector, offerings include both centralised and decentralised services in account receivables, account payables and document processing.

A representative of Greylock India declined to spell out details of the investment as TechProcess might announce the details shortly. Greylock, however, added that they were part of a consortium which invested in Techprocess recently.

TechProcess has a pan-India reach at 58 locations with a team of more than 600 backed by an in-house technology team providing proprietary software applications. The company aims to build robust and scalable operations that interface seamlessly with multiple back-end systems.

Ganesh Rengaswamy of Greylock India said, "We recently set up our India office, which is the second one outside the US, besides one in Israel. We are currently investing from our global fund. There might be a thought of an India-specific fund at a later stage as volumes increase."

Detailing further, Greylock in a note added that over the years they have been partners to a number of technology entrepreneurs of Indian origin.

"Greylock has a long-term commitment to help build world-class companies in India with potential to become industry leaders in domestic and/ or global markets. Our current areas of focus in India include technology and technology-enabled services including IT product companies, consumer Internet, mobile and services across verticals," the note added.