US-based Trident Capital plans to invest around $50-60 million this year in companies across the world and around $10 million in India.

“We are geo-agnostic. The next big idea may come from Europe, Russia or South America,” Ms Venetia Kontogouris, Senior Managing Director, Trident Capital, told Business Line .

She, however, pointed out that that while India is well known for its IT services industry, it has few products worth talking about, and this has a lot to do with the fact that the ecosystem for products is lacking in the country.

Ecosystem

“I think that we need to create unique ecosystem. For example, if you want to create a wireless product, you need to have in depth knowledge of telecom, which means that you have to be where all the other big telecom players are so that you can hire such people.”

In other words, since there are very few IT product companies in India, the number of people with the required skills are also very small – and this means that new companies can't enter this space because there is no talent pool for them to tap into, said Ms Kontogouris and contrasted this with the fact that a new IT services company can be set up quickly because this new company can tap into the existing talent pool.

Trident has invested over $1.6 billion of capital in 150 companies worldwide and invests in areas such as enterprise services and software, healthcare IT, Internet technologies and green technologies. When asked about what surprised her the most about Indian IT companies, she said, “There are no significant Indian companies in the Internet technology space.”

She said Trident Capital looks for consistent performance in companies before investing in them. “We do a lot of market diligence before we put money in a company. And even when we do invest, we invest around $2-3 million and see how far they go before writing the next cheque.”

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