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Netravali to set up $250 mn VC fund
Palakunnathu G Mathai , S Ravindran in Mumbai |
October 30, 2003 09:01 IST
Former Bell Laboratories President Arun N Netravali is setting up a $250 million venture capital fund, which will focus on funding start-up firms in the US outsourcing research and development projects to India.
Netravali told Business Standard in an interview on Wednesday: "At present, only big companies are outsourcing to India. The challenge is to get the smaller companies to do so. The idea is to close the fund by the end of the year. A part of the money has already come in."
The company, called Omni Capital, includes a senior banker among others, but Netravali refused to divulge their names.
Netravali, an alumnus of Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, who studied in the US before joining Bell Labs, acknowledged that US companies would be chary of outsourcing R&D to India, fearing pilferage of ideas.
But he said as a technologist he would be better placed to persuade them to outsource work to India.
Netravali quit Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, in April after working for 30 years. He was responsible for R&D across all of Lucent, which has an annual budget of $3.5 billion and employs 22,000 people. He held a variety of management positions in AT&T and Lucent, covering R&D in computing and telecommunications.