The Hindu : Bangalore facilities impress venture capitalist

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Feb 26, 2004

Business

Business

Bangalore facilities impress venture capitalist

By Our Staff Reporter

BANGALORE, FEB. 25. His visits to Bangladesh to see how Grameen Bank worked or to Guntur in Andhra Pradesh, where an experiment with micro-credit had given dignity to poor people were worth mentioning. The co-founder of SUN Microsystems and successful venture capitalist, Vinod Khosla, had no doubt that scientific and technological India was progressing.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, an investment firm in the U.S. where Mr. Khosla is a partner, has put money in three companies here — Centrata, Metric Stream and Infinera. During his visit here, he took a less publicised tour of a small chip design company, Insilica, on Sunday.

The `fabless' chip company apparently impressed him enough to say that Insilica's Bangalore unit could count itself among the best anywhere. It was Mr. Khosla who had wanted to visit Insilica. "He has no investments in our company and the visit was strictly to look at what we were doing,'' Mr. Anant Agrawal, CEO of Insilica, told The Hindu.

Mr. Khosla himself wanted to talk about how pharmaceuticals and medical biotechnology could become "a $50 billion market'' in the country in less than ten years. Mr. Khosla believed that fundamental research of the best kind was possible. In the last five years, the research labs of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research had undergone a radical change for the better, with some "really talented people" working in them, he said.

The ecosystems for research-based companies were on the cusp of maturity in cities such as Bangalore and Hyderabad. This was the time for the government to do everything in its power to keep the flow of talent going, boost infrastructure development and establish policies that encouraged interaction between academic research and commercial enterprise. Bangalore's Indian Institute of Science, which had already spawned a few start-ups, could become India's Stanford University, Mr. Agrawal said.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Business