Goldman Sachs invests Rs 95 crore in Tejas

PRIVATE EQUITY WATCH

Bangalore-based Tejas Networks, an optical networking products company, has received a funding of Rs 95 crore from Goldman Sachs.

The funds will be used by Tejas to ramp up its research and development centre in Bangalore and expand overseas. The company is also planning to an initial public offering within the next 12 months.

Tejas Networks figures among the handful of Indian IT products to be able to attract investments from venture capital and private equity players. Till date, the company has been managed four rounds of investments. It has raised close to $75 million (around Rs 300 crore) in the last seven years .

The company's focus has been on the telecom industry and providing products and software solutions to these players in building converged optical networks.

Currently, more than 60,000 systems across the globe use Tejas solutions and products.

The company has developed close to 10 products and filed four patents in the telecom segment. It is also planning to enter into new business of carrier Ethernets.

Sanjay Nayak, co-founder and CEO, told Business Standard: "We have a presence in the international telecom space but want to increase our growth and invest in emerging markets like South East Asia, Africa and Middle East. We also want to ramp up our sales and marketing team in these geographies."

He believes the global market for the company's offering is close to $8-10 billion. Whereas the Indian market currently is $300 million and is expected to reach $500 million is a couple of years.

"We have been very focused in terms of the business and the segment that we want to be in. Hence, in the telecom, we are focused on service providers, especially in the wireline business and which are looking at optical fibre business," says Nayak.

Nayak is confident of scaling up the company's revenues to Rs 400 crore in the current financial year as against last year's Rs 235 crore. The company has 495 employees, of which 300 are engaged in R&D in Bangalore and Mumbai.