Reliance ADA VC firm ties up with MIT, Stanford

Reliance ADA VC firm ties up with MIT, Stanford

Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group promoted venture capital (VC), Reliance Venture Asset Management (RVAM), has forged a strategic collaboration with two prestigious universities — Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford University — by sponsoring their entrepreneurship competitions and start-up programmes.
RVAM has associated itself with the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES) for the latter’s business plan competition ‘e-challenge’ besides participating in one of BASES’ flagship programmes titled e-Bootcamp — a three day intensive entrepreneurship workshop. It has also invested in two MIT start-ups.
As part of an exclusive India arrangement, RVAM will mentor winners of MIT’s $100,000 Entrepreneurship Competition for the 2010 and offer opportunities to develop business ideas in emerging countries such as India through its incubator programme.
“These are formal collaborations for perpetuity under which no Indian VC other than RVAM can associate with MIT and Stanford for their respective entrepreneurship competitions as the India partner. Through these, we want to promote collaborative Indo-US investments,” says Harshal J Shah, CEO and board member, RVAM.
Since its inception in 2006, the company has closed 13 deals and is sector, stage and geography agnostic in approach. The company usually makes investments to the tune of $1-15 million (Rs 4.7-70 crore) this being its investment sweet spot. It has $50 million (Rs 235 crore) slated for investment this year and targets to fund 3-6 companies, of which it has already invested in two-Tessolve Services and ReverseLogistics.
Though RVAM has partnerships with the IITs and IIMs, Shah says Indian start-ups are based on technology-enabled models while foreign start-ups revolve around technology-creation models and are more R&D driven.
“The reason why we associated with MIT is because two of our portfolio companies Scalable Display and Dhama Apparel are start-ups from MIT, and with Stanford, because Stoke Inc — one of our portfolio companies — uses technology developed by Stanford,” he adds.

Source Link: http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/reliance-ada-vc-firm-ties-upmit-stanford/398083/