VenSat to invest $15 mn in two years

VenSat Tech Services, a Hyderabad-headquartered animation and visual effects company floated by six former head honchos of Satyam BPO (now Mahindra Satyam BPO), including its chief executive Venkatesh Roddam and chief financial officer Satyanarayana Mudunuri, is planning to invest $15 million (approximately Rs 67 crore) in the next two years.

“We already have with us a part of the investment and are currently looking at multiple options to raise the rest. The investments will be a mix and match of working capital, forming alliances and going in for acquisitions, besides creating a potential fund to co-produce content and fuel our studios to execute them in time,” Venkatesh Roddam, executive director of VenSat, told Business Standard.

VenSat, christened after Roddam and Mudunuri with the first three English alphabets in their respective names, has IndoUS Venture Partners and city-based film production house Annapurna Studios as its investors. It was incorporated in July 2009 and has been in active production since December 2009.

Roddam said the company already had an established presence in North America, where it has incorporated a subsidiary called VenSat America. “It is in that geography that we are looking at potentially-interested companies that could form a target for acquisition. The acquisition is going to be driven by clients, followed by people and technology. All the alliances and acquisitions are expected to crystallise by October-December this year,” he said.

Riding high on the success of the 10-plus projects that it had already worked for, including the award-winning ‘Land of Astronauts’, Rajnikant-starrer ‘Robo’ and Salman Khan’s ‘Daabang’, VenSat is now in the process of building a strong pipeline. Roddam said the company was working on an active pipeline of about 50 projects, which are at various levels of engagements with potential customers.

Over the last 15-16 months, VenSat has delivered a major European production in 2D flash, a 2D flash project called ‘Werner’ for the German market, besides executing 2D-3D conversion for a part of ‘Narnia – The Voyage of the Dawn Treader’.

“We are about to kick off a large North American project in 3D flash animation and a 52-episode stereoscopic project in computer-generated imagery (CGI), which are under confidentiality agreements,” he said.

For VenSat, 2D-3D conversion is a huge thrust area and hence the company is investing a lot of money and energy into it, particularly in training its staff, because of the fact that Indian market had a bad name for “over-promising and under-delivering”. Roddam said the future of the 2D-3D conversion business was going to be focused and driven by North America.

“We expect to garner revenues of $10 million (Rs 44.7 crore) by March 2012, of which the US is expected to account for 98 per cent,” he said