For example, last year we made a $13.8 million investment in Persistent Systems, a world-class Outsourced Software Product Development (OPD) company based in Pune—a company that is growing at a 60 per cent growth rate each year. The OPD sector is extremely important to India’s IT evolution.

• Will the raised corpus mean that the total number of investments by Norwest in India will go up?

Yes, our latest Fund, NVP X, will enable us to pursue early, mid and late-stage, investment-worthy emerging growth opportunities in the global IT sector, particularly in India. Norwest is traditionally an early stage VC firm. We are extremely interested in both seed and early stage investments in India and creating new technology companies, as well as investing in successful later-stage companies.

• Is the domestic Indian market changing fast enough to attract capital too?

We prefer to invest in companies that target global markets, but with the spending and growth opportunities within the wireless (and other) industries in India, new markets are being created and therefore, we believe India-focused start-ups (start-ups that serve the local market) will continue to attract funding.

• What has been the track record of previous locally-looking investments in India?

In fact, we recently partnered with Reliance Capital, Television 18 Group (TV18), and seasoned travel industry executives to form Yatra Online, the first online and centralised travel services company for the India market. This was a direct investment in an Indian company focused in the local market, and we are excited about the company and this sector.