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Newsletter - Summer 2009
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New Investments  We led the Series A in Telibrahma and syndicated with Ojas Ventures. Telibrahma is a Bangalore company we'd tracked as it bootstrapped through development and its first year of revenue. Telibrahma uses its patent-pending Bluetooth networks, to deliver information, applications, promotions and advertising to India's mobile consumers. India is the fastest growing mobile market in the world, and has 450 million subs to date out of a 1.1 Billion population.
 Transportation is another large core industry growing well in India, and we led the second round in redBus with a syndicate including Helion. Nearly $3 billion in bus tickets are sold each year by thousands of bus operators with no central booking capability. redBus has become India's leading online bus ticketing company, and we'd tracked the founders for two years. Consistent with the venture model we prefer, redBus drives growth with an efficient operating model, and is led by an entrepreneurial team that grew revenue nearly 3X this past year.
 A profitable leader in off-shoring enterprise applications and outsourced product development, Sierra has particular expertise and relationships with Oracle and Microsoft. Kanwal was the first investor in the company and Inventus recently led a secondary stock purchase. One of the leading cross-border IT companies, Sierra is HQed in Silicon Valley and has 1000+ engineers in Hyderabad, India.
 Headquartered in Silicon Valley with development in Bangalore, Vivu has commercialized an innovative video solution that delivers online video events and multi-point video conferencing via standard internet browsers. Our most recent investment, we led the Series A with a syndicate including DFJ to finance the company's launch in these large and expanding internet video markets.
Looking forward to staying in touch,
Kanwal,
John, Samir & Parag
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If you'll be in Mumbai for the PEI Conference this October or AVCJ-India this December, let us know. Otherwise look us up the next time you're in the Bay Area or Bangalore.
India's Economy
India presents a robust investment opportunity for a capital efficient venture model. While the U.S. economy and public markets are enduring a deep recession, India's fundamentals continue to drive GDP growth over 6%. As a result, India's total job reduction amounts to less than 1/14th of the U.S. adjusted for population. More importantly, most of the Indian economy is driven by its own domestic consumption, internal growth and a rapidly emerging middle-class. This presents a resilient foundation for business creation, in no small part due a long tradition of low leverage and high savings rates. Indians save nearly 35% compared to less than 5% in the U.S. Further, only ~30 million credit cards are issued in a country of over 1 billion, home mortgages account for just 6% of GDP, and Indian industry carries little to no debt relative to western businesses. This is particularly the case in the differentiated and high-margin software and services business models where we have particular focus and expertise. From an end-industry point of view, we've found attractive opportunities addressing growth areas of large markets that we also think of as "necessity-based" - healthcare, transportation, education, and communications to name a few.
About Inventus
Over the fifteen years prior to forming Inventus in 2007, the Inventus GPs financed and mentored over 90 Indian or Indo-Americans entrepreneurs with operations in Silicon Valley and/or India. To date our companies have completed dozens of successful IPOs or mergers resulting in the creation of over $30 billion in aggregate wealth and market value. We apply our entrepreneurial, operating and venture experiences to help early-growth companies address the burgeoning Indian economy, or access Indian talent to efficiently go after global markets. Select prior investments:
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