Top growth capital investments during the quarter included the $20 million third round raised by e-tailer Yebhi.com from Fidelity Growth Partners India and Qualcomm Ventures, with participation from existing investors; the $14.5 million fourth round raised by urban microfinance firm Janalakshmi Financial Services and the $5 million third round raised by remote IT infra management firm Appnomic Systems. Among Early Stage deals, Fidelity Growth Partners India invested $20 million into US- and India-based analytics BPO firm AbsolutData Research and retail loyalty management software firm Capillary Technologies raised $15.5 million from Sequoia Capital, Norwest and existing backer Qualcomm Ventures.
Information Technology and IT-Enabled Services (IT & ITES) companies, at 36 deals worth about $124 million, attracted 69% of the investments in volume terms and 62% in value terms. Healthcare & Life Sciences companies (which attracted 6 investments worth $15 million) and Financial Services firms (4 investments worth $32 million) were the next most popular industry targets during the latest quarter. Within IT, the dominance of the Online Services sector (including E-Commerce) declined significantly in Q3’12 with the 18 investments worth about $50 million that it attracted accounting for 50% of the IT & ITES pie by volume and 40% by value.
VC firms found exit routes for seven portfolio companies in the latest quarter – all via M&A transactions. The Bharti Group sold two of its VC-backed companies - education focused Centum Learning and Mobile VAS firm Comviva Technologies – to publicly listed acquirers. The merger of Centum Learning with Everonn Education provided an exit for Mayfield which had invested into Centum in Jun-10. The 51% stake acquisition in Comviva by Tech Mahindra provided an exit for Sequoia Capital India and Cisco. E-commerce firm Fashion and You acquired fellow fashion etailer UrbanTouch.com providing an exit for the latter’s investors, Tiger Global and Accel Partners.
