WestBridge eyes high-growth sectors

WestBridge Capital Partners, a venture capital fund primarily focused on outsourced services and IT technology companies, is now looking at India's other high growth sectors.

The company is eyeing sectors like hotel and travel-tourism, medical devices, pharma contract research and manufacturing as these sectors are growing at more than 30 per cent annually for the last two years. Having invested $150 million of its $300 million corpus in IT companies, it now has a $200 million corpus for these growth sectors.

"Outside of IT companies, we recently invested $6.5 million in Dr Lal PathLabs, a healthcare diagnostics services company," said K P Balaraj, managing director at WestBridge Capital.

Now it has invested Rs 25 crore in Baljee's Royal Orchid Hotels Group.

With Dr Lal PathLabs, the company plans to ride the diagnostic services market which is set to boom and is expected to be a billion dollar industry over the next decade.

This is among the first few investments made by any institutional/private equity investor in an Indian diagnostic company. With this investment, WestBridge has acquired a 26 per cent stake in the company.