Gujarat Venture Finance Ltd (GVFL) has decided to invest in VMukti Solutions, a company incubated at the Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship at IIM-Ahmedabad, and Vadodara-based Century Pharmaceuticals. “We will be making these investments from the Rs 20-crore Gujarat IT Fund and the Rs 50-crore Gujarat Biotech Venture Fund, respectively,” says GVFL chief executive officer Vishnu Varshney. The GVFL funding will also help the two companies in brand building. VMukti Solutions, which is listed on Nasscom’s Top-100 Innovative Companies of 2006 and 2007, is in the development and marketing of products based on unified collaborative communication platform. Its product line of web convergence, peer-to-peer architechture and telecom applications caters to global telecom services players such as Bluesky, T-Mobile and Stercom.

Hardik Sanghvi, promoter of VMukti solutions says, “This fund will help us in building our applications and modules for our clients in future.” Century Pharma, on the other hand, has been developing injectibles for asthma allergies. The Rs 18-crore company has entered into a license and development agreement with Israel’s Target-In for commercialisation of apoptosis-based technology. Janak Seth, MD of Century Pharma, says, “This technology can provide allergy and asthma patients effective treatment that could last for three months, with no side effects. The treatment would be effective against a wide array of allergies while being cost-effective.”

GVFL is raising Rs 250-crore for a pan-India SME Technology Venture Fund to promote emerging technologies in the small and medium enterprises sector. The company has raised five venture capital funds with a combined capital of Rs 140 crore by investing in 58 companies across the country. Net4nuts, Parsec Technologies, Sahajanand Technologies, eInfochips, Icenet, Scicom are few of the companies where GFVL has invested in. Says Varshney, “We will focus on eight big sectors—clean energy, healthcare, mobile, hospitality, IT, Internet, ITeS, education, financial services and entertainment.”

Source: www.economictimes.indiatimes.com

Date:- 28 January, 2008