Bharti Telesoft sells 10 p.c. stake to VCs

NEW DELHI: Three leading global venture capital funds - WestBridge Capital Partners, Sequoia Capital and Cisco Systems — have made a strategic investment of $13.5 million in Bharti Telesoft.

Bharti has offloaded 10 percent stake in Bharti Telesoft to the group of investors.

Announcing this at a press conference, Bharti said that the Silicon Valley-based Sequoia Capital is investing in India for the first time.

The WestBridge Capital Partners has made an investment of $8 million, with Sequoia Capital $3 million and Cisco $2.5 million.

Vice-chairman Bharti Enterprise, Rakesh Mittal said that this strategic partnership would establish a platform to share knowledge ad expertise to grow further.

“The investment will be used to facilitate acquisitions, enhance product development and to further expand internationally. This will prove to be an added impetus to achieve our aim of being the leading global provider of innovative products, solutions and services to the telecom sector,” Sanjiv Mital, CEO of Bharti Telesoft, said.

Bharti Telesoft is a subsidiary of Bharti Enterprise, a provider of value-added products and services for the mobile telephony sector across the world.

Deployed in over 25 countries across five continents, these solutions deliver customer focused services to over 100 million mobile subscribers worldwide, Bharti said.

Speaking on the investment, managing director, WestBridge Capital SK Jain said, “We believe that the value added services are poised for rapid growth globally and being a partner with the Bharti Telesoft would prove beneficial for us. We are impressed with the management team and the strategic guidance provided by Bharti Enterprises.”

Sequoia Capital has over 30 years of experience in providing funding to high potential companies in the technology space. The WestBridge Capital is a Mauritius-based, Indian venture capital fund with approximately $350 million under management.

The fund focuses primarily on high growth India domestic services, IT and outsourced services businesses that are leaders in their market segments.

CyberMedia News