Investment Thesis: Ramneek Gupta (Part 1)

I had invited Mark Sherman at Battery Ventures to contribute his perspective to the series. Mark has responded via Ramneek Gupta, who wants to focus this interview on investment as it pertains to India, specifically. Battery has a major focus on India right now.

SM: Please describe your background, to help entrepreneurs understand your point-of-view.
RG: I grew up in Bangalore, went to IIT Bombay for a BTech in ME, came to Stanford to get a MS in ME, worked for a Stanford startup followed by product development stints at PMC-Sierra and TiVo and then transitioned to VC. Additionally, the India practice has a great deal of input from Carl Stjernfeldt and Mark Sherman at Battery Ventures. Carl is focused on the wirless and wireline communication technologies and services ranging from components to service providers and is on the board of Tejas Networks based out of Bangalore, India. Mark is focused on consumer finance, software and ITES sectors and opportunities emerging from India. Prior to Battery, Mark ran Robertson Stephens’ software and internet investment banking practices, completing IPOs and M&As for Openwave, Aether, Doubleclick, InfoSpace, BEA, Siebel, JD Edwards, Quest Software, etc.

SM: What stage are you looking to invest in over the next 6-12 months?
RG: We are looking both at early stage companies (preferably in partnership with a local, on the ground, operations focused firm) as well as mid to late stage companies that have proven management teams and revenues

SM: What segment(s)?
RG: Broadly focused on IT and ITES segments. More specifically we are very interested in opportunities in the mobile and internet spaces, consumer finance, BPO/KPO, Content/Media etc.

SM: What market dynamics do you look for?
RG: A very large addressable market (mobile value chains or anything consumer facing at the right price points of course) or a market that could be very large in the near term (internet related businesses). Additionally, we are always focused on companies that are able to address the pain points of the 300MM strong middle class in India.

SM: What size of investment are you looking to make?
RG: Battery Ventures is a stage and size agnostic firm. We are quite comfortable with making sub $1MM investments in seed stage opportunities (in which we of course can see a path towards a larger investment in later rounds) as well as check sizes in the range of $10-15MM in the initial round and up to $25MM over the life cycle of the company.

(to be continued)

This segment is part 1 in the series : Investment Thesis: Ramneek Gupta
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