Mistral raises $6.5 million

Mistral Solutions, a product realisation company in the embedded space, announced on Wednesday that it has raised $6.5 million in a second round of venture funding from Nexus India Ventures and JAFCO Asia.

The investment will help accelerate the company's global expansion and also facilitate its product and IP development initiatives.

Mistral is an ISO 9001:2000 certified and CMMi Level 3 appraised Bangalore-based company providing end-to-end services for product design and development in the embedded space.

Mistral offers design and development services covering hardware and software, customisable product designs and IP's, system integration and solutions that improve quality and accelerate time-to-market for a broad range of embedded systems.

Mistral has forged partnerships with providers of embedded solutions to expand its offerings. Naren Gupta from Nexus and Byron Askin from JAFCO Asia will represent the investors at Mistral.

Naren Gupta is the Vice Chairman of Wind River Systems, a global company in embedded systems software. Naren also serves on the boards of some of the other technology companies such as RedHat and TIBCO.

Byron Askin is Senior Director and Head of South Asia and leads JAFCO Asia's investment efforts in the rapidly growing Indian market.

"We see Nexus and JAFCO Asia adding a lot of value to the organisation and its goals. Both the funds bring a wealth of resources and experience to the Mistral Management, which will assist us in building global relationships in US and Asia Pacific markets. The funding will help the company in its plans for R&D investment for design of sub systems for the growing Indian defence market and set up of its design centre in USA", said Anees Ahmed, President and CEO of Mistral.

"We see tremendous opportunities in the embedded product and service space and are excited to be partnering with an experienced and committed team", added Naren Gupta, Founding Managing Director of Nexus India Capital. Nexus India Capital is India based VC focused on investing in innovative early to growth stage companies across sectors in India.

"Mistral's management has delivered consistent growth and profit margin improvement in recent years. Mistral is positioned to benefit from increased system level complexity and an increasing outsourcing trend. We look forward to assisting the management in their efforts to enter markets in East Asia," commented Byron Askin, Senior Director of JAFCO Asia. JAFCO Asia is a pan-Asian technology focused venture capital firm with $650 million under management.

Headquartered in Singapore, JAFCO Asia is an operating subsidiary of JAFCO Co. Ltd which is part of the Nomura group of companies and one of the largest private equity firms in Japan with $4 billion under management.