Infy's Bala to be an investor in Unitus Seed Fund

Set to join likes of Vinod Khosla, Mohandas Pai, Ranjan Pai to support entrepreneurs

V Balakrishnan, a senior member of the board of Infosys, India’s second largest software services company, is set to take the plunge to support entrepreneurs who are creating viable businesses targeting the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) segment. It is most likely that he will finalise a commitment to invest with Bangalore-based Unitus Seed Fund, which makes seed-stage venture investments in BoP startups that serve large, low-income populations.

Balakrishnan (Bala), as and when he decides to commit to the Unitus Seed Fund, will be joining the likes of globally-renowned investors and luminaries such as Vinod Khosla (Khosla Ventures), Bob Gay (co-founder of Bain Capital), Jeff Clark (Impact Investment Leaders), Hari Kumar (Formerly Goldman Sachs), besides well-known Indian entrepreneur Ranjan Pai, CEO, Manipal Education and Medical Group, and Mohandas Pai (ex-CFO of Infosys and now with Manipal Education Group), who are key investors in this fund.

In addition to the individual investors, Unitus has also raised funds from institutional investors such as Crystal Springs Foundation, ImpactAssets, Unitus Labs and The Renaissance Foundation. Unitus Seed Fund has already made six investments ranging from affordable schooling in rural areas to online crowd sourcing for microloans among others. Unitus, which also has a parallel head-office in Seattle, is looking at a total corpus of $25 million by looking to funnel in $15 million from the US investors while the rest of the $10 million will be from Indian investors.

Unitus has so far raised $8 million from the first close, and is looking at the second close shortly.

Unitus Seed Fund Partner Srikrishna Ramamoorthy told Business Standard: “We are presently actively raising funds for our India domestic fund and are in conversations with many individuals and groups including Bala. We are seeing strong investor interest and will have announcements to make as soon as we receive Sebi approval of our fund, which we expect soon. The fact that someone with Bala’s experience and background is thinking about impact investing is great signalling for the space we operate in and good validation of our strategy of investing to achieve impact as well as competitive rates of return for our investors.”

Bala on his part told Business Standard that Unitus has approached him to be an investor and he is yet to decide.

This move by Bala comes hardly weeks after he sold a part of his family holding in Infosys for Rs 33 crore. Early this month, Bala offloaded 100,000 shares of Infosys held by his daughters in the open market and had at that time said that he is doing it for a personal reasons. Bala, one of the strong contenders for the post of the CEO of Infosys, presently heads Infosys BPO and the India business, and was given additional responsibility of managing the North American region for a new vertical called utilities and resources. Earlier this year, he was made the chairman of the Switzerland-based consultancy firm Lodestone that the Infosys had acquired in a $350-million deal.