Sathguru sets up $100 mn VC fund

Hyderabad-based Sathguru Management Consultants (SMC) on Friday launched a venture fund initiative with an initial corpus of $100 million (Rs 450 crore). The company also introduced its ERP solution — Sathguru@Retail — for the retail sector.

The ‘T-harmony’ venture fund initiative would function under the trilateral business models and would be operational by June 2011. “We have deployed about $20 million in the first phase and the rest would be in the next six months,” SMC founder-director K Vijayaraghavan told mediapersons.

The fund would invest $2-3 million each in around 25 ventures across 6-7 countries. These would be mainly in agriculture, food and seed industry. “This will be a risk and conditional investment and an innovation funding platform for agriculture, life sciences, health, energy, environment. innovation and technology commercialisation,” he said.

 

Sathguru would provide funding support to enterprises in Africa and Asia for translate technologies. It would involve knowledge provision, entrepreneurship building programme, and science management.

According to him, Sathguru@Retail, based on the Oracle's latest fusion middleware technology, was developed and implemented for Courts (Fiji) Limited, a multi-sector retail chain.

The company is growing at 35-40 per cent in the domestic market annually. It registered revenues of $.5million last year and has 150 professionals working for it. Sathguru would add new product verticals, including insurance, to its existing five-product portfolio.

“We are targeting $ 5-10 million revenues under the product category from the current $ 2 million,” Raghunathan Kannan, director of SMC said.