News: Artiman Ventures to raise $175 mn second fIndia und

(BS 29/09/2006) Chennai/Bangalore - Artiman Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund with a strong India play, is looking at raising its second fund which is expected to have a corpus of around $175 million.

Artiman is likely to exhaust commitments from its first fund, which also had a corpus of $175 million.

According to industry information, the process of raising the second fund had already been initiated with The Pennsylvania State Employees' Retirement System confirming that it would invest $25 million in Artiman Ventures II.

Artiman is venture fund put together by technology industry veterans such as Amit Shah of Cisco fame, besides Saurabh Srivastava (a renowned serial entrepreneur), and M J Aravind who was the co-founder of Daksh which was acquired by IBM.

Artiman investments range in the size from $100,000 seed to a conventional Series A investment of $2-4M. The fund prefers to limit aggregate investment over the life of a company to approximately $10 million in capital.

Artiman typically is the first institutional capital, most often at the 'concept stage' when entrepreneurs are still refining their key ideas and concepts. At the concept stage, the Artiman team acts as collaborative partners to give strategic direction to the venture.

During its first fund, Artiman funded companies such as NetDevices and Airwide Solutions besides a clutch of other companies which have significant development centres in India.