Happy to report that we have announced closure of our eighth fund at $650M. The fund will continue to focus on early stage technology businesses in US, India and Israel. India could account for upto 25% of the fund commitments.
For our India operations, this is a significant increase in commitment. We started investing in India in 2000, and opened our office here in Mar 2006 – one of the very early VCs to do so. Over past couple of years, we have made four investments. More importantly, we have been able to establish a finer understanding of the Indian venture opportunity amongst the entire partnership. Going into our next fund, we feel more and more convinced about the potential that India offers, and more educated about the kind of opportunities we would involve ourselves in. The broad areas of investment will continue to be Internet, Mobile applications, Managed services, Software products, Transaction platforms and the like.
Over past couple of years, we have also grown our team to respond to the increasing set of opportunities we see in India. Recently, we brought Harish Gandhi on board, and he has been a great addition to the team.
Look forward to more exciting times ahead, and an opportunity to partner with great teams in building great businesses.
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Hi Alok,
It would be great if you take up virat’s question as your next blog article 🙂 Interesting question which will result in more interesting comments/discussions!
I would like to ask …..what is defination of great team?
I am very curious to know defination of great team. Every investment companies write about exceution team. But i am not very clear with great team.
At One side you have top exec of top companies at other side you have success hungry underdogs. How you derive balance between them to find right business proposition?
Shivaas, around 80% of our business is classic series A – close to version 1 product, some pilots, but no revenues – typically $2-5M from us in first round. 20% of our business is seed – less than a million dollars, more at concept/ prototype stage. We will be doing some of these in India as well. The key drivers to a seed opportunity for us are large market opportunities and great teams. For Series A, those are important as well, but differentiation, how well the team has executed and what clients think of the specific offering are other key criteria.
Hi Alok
Does Canaan also look for seed or early stage investments in India ? If yes, then to what tune ?
Would be great if you could have a series of posts which tells budding startups on how to approach the funding process, and how much is good to get off the ground and scale up in India.
Regards
Congrat! It’s best time for any investment in India and $650M will create a lot opportunities here which is one of the largest fund this year for a Idian company.