More India Funds

Yet another India fund was announced today.
Matrix Partners has set up a $150 million fund to invest in consumer-focused industries mainly in the Internet, telecoms and media space. The fund will be co-managed by Avnish Bajaj, former founder/CEO of Bazee.com and after it sold to eBay, its chairman of Indian operations. (via Rafat Ali).

I was speaking with Sumir Chadha last week, about Sequoia’s strategy in India. They are also, clearly, focusing on consumer Internet and Media.

I am sure, over the next 12 months, more venture capital will be committed to India. The shortage is good entrepreneurs, good business ideas, and fundable deals.

So if you are an entrepreneur with expertise in India, chances are, you will be able to find financing as things heat up. You WILL need to bootstrap the seed stage, most likely, since seed capital & seed investment expertise is in short supply there right now.

Interestingly, I have been receiving emails from entrepreneurs in India asking for feedback and validation of their early-stage ideas over the last month. If you do have such deals in the making, please feel free to send them to me. Many of my Silicon Valley friends are interested in funding Indian ventures, and if you do have something compelling, finding some seed money here may be quite viable.

This does not need to consumer internet only. As I have said before, the US SME facing opportunity with Indian back-end is a very interesting opportunity as well.

Finally, I am working on an excellent enabling technology play right now out of Canada, which leads me to suggest that good enabling technology businesses should also be considered.

Remember when Google was an enabling technology that powered search engines such as Yahoo? The beauty of enabling technology businesses is that they are a lot more defensible, capital efficient, and less risky to build than pure-play consumer internet, which at the moment is very crowded and noisy.