Mentor and Venture Capitalist
In December 2001, Dham made a trip to India where he met several business. He was impressed by the success of India’s information technology (IT) services industry based on offshoring of US software development to India and was wondering what it would take to recreate a similar US – India model for hardware and chip design offshoring to India. With seed capital from other venture capitalists in April 2002 he co-founded an incubator NewPath Ventures. It invested in Chip and System design companies like Telsima (WiMAX chips for broadband), Montalvo Systems (low-power chips) and InSilica (chips for multimedia and digital printing processors) and Nevis (secure networking) with development teams in India for markets in U.S. The timing was right, with Silicon Valley looking at reducing expenditure in the chip development space. Dham, with his partner, was extremely hands on in helping these companies in their day-to-day operations. However the experience highlighted that with so much focus on software, India had not yet developed the critical mass of skills for chip design work and speciality software expertise to support the 'offshoring' model. These start ups were subsequently acquired. Having learnt that the opportunities for venture backed startups in India will likely revolve more around services required to meet the needs of India’s growing consumer class, Dham subsequently co-founded NEA-IndoUS Ventures a cross border India focused fund in 2006 with New Enterprise Associates (NEA). The firm was later re-branded IndoUS Venture Partners. Currently, Dham runs IUVP with his two Bengaluru based investment partners. IUVP’s focus has been on investing in Indian companies across sectors including mobile technology, knowledge process outsourcing, Internet, education and healthcare. Over the past four years, IndoUS Venture has invested in over two dozen companies. Dham also believes that the model of outsourcing that is fairly large scale in IT services and software can be recreated in other value added knowledge sectors like finance, education, healthcare and legal.
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