 "Micromax's Orbis Capital helps the best technology companies reach the Indian consumer")
Micromax today announced that it is setting up an independent fund which will raise up to 100 million. The idea is simple and it is to help consumer internet companies around the globe connect and reach the Indian consumer. Indeed, Micromax has been here before. But at a time when the company has not done too well with plenty of competition coming from global and Chinese brands, the question indeed was why and why now? “Given the larger opportunity set we saw in the market, we wanted to expand the investment program – an independent fund is the best structure for addressing this opportunity. " commented Rahul Sharma Co-founder of Micromax. According to Micromax, the anchor commitment comes from the company while it is the fund’s team that will be approaching traditional limited partners such as family offices, pension funds both in India and internationally to raise this corpus. The strategy too remains pretty much in line with the past. This would involve finding the best consumer internet technologies from around the world and using the existing platform to help those new technologies reach the Indian consumer. Micromax back in 2015 had announced that it would pick stake in not less than 20 startups. Since then, it has invested in 10 companies so far. The notable ones include, ixigo, Gaana, miMedia, Zapr and HealthifyMe which eventually got integrated in its smartphone ecosystem. This time around things are a bit different where Orbis Capital is an independent entity and Micromax is a strategic partner. Looking back into the past, Sharma commented that, “The best indicator of portfolio company success is the ability of the companies to raise follow on rounds and attract high quality investors especially in a tough venture environment that we have observed in 2016. All our portfolio companies have successfully raised capital in 2016, some of them have been already announced while others are in the process of closing the rounds.” hinting at the success of previous investments.
At a time when Micromax has not done too well with plenty of competition coming from global and Chinese brands, the question indeed was why and why now?
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