Exclusive: UK-based, mid-market focused private equity fund Englefield Capital is setting up an office in India. The London-headquartered fund has hired Dinesh Vaswani, who was earlier a managing director with Temasek Holdings in India, as the co-head of the fund. The other co-head is Jerome Mourgue d’Algue, who is moving in from Englesfield’s London office. Vaswani has confirmed the development to VC Circle.
Englefield Capital is an independent private equity firm with committed equity funds of $2.73 billion making investments in buyout and development capital. The fund was set up in 2002 by Dominic Shorthouse, who was a managing director of Warburg Pincus in London.
It targets equity investments of $46.5 million to $233 million in mid-market companies across Europe, usually with enterprise values in excess of $116 million.
Dinesh who joined Temasek in 2006, stayed with the firm for about two years. He had joined Temasek from US venture capital fund Bessemer Venture Partners where he was an entrepreneur-in-residence. Prior to that he was a general partner at Walden International, where he was heading the Indian unit and was also responsible for software investments in South East Asia and served on the boards of Mindtree, Venture Infotek and Webdunia. He has operating and investment experience in early stage software companies.
Previously, he was founding CEO of WordWalla, a venture-backed company that developed embedded software for mobile devices. He has also worked at EventSource.com, The Chatterjee Group, Soros Fund Management and Blue Star Infotech besides Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), from where he started his career.
Mourgue d’Algue joined Englefield in 2003. Previously he was with Morgan Stanley Capital Partners in London, where from 2000 to 2003 he focused on financial services, cable and healthcare. He was with McKinsey & Co too.
