Madison India Capital Management LLC, a mid-market private equity firm focused on media, communications and business services with a typical investment appetite of $5-20 million, has picked up a minority stake in Gurgaon- and New York-based iYogi Technical Services Pvt Ltd, a provider of remote and on-site tech support services. The transaction includes a mix of primary and secondary investments. The exact quantum of the investment could not be immediately ascertained.
An email sent to iYogi co-founder and CEO Uday Challu to confirm the development did not elicit any response till the time of publishing this article.
Amarchand & Mangaldas & Suresh A. Shroff Co. (AMSS) acted as the Indian legal advisor while PricewaterhouseCoopers acted as the financial advisor to Madison India Capital Management on this deal.
VCCircle was the first to report that iYogi is raising $60 million in a pre-IPO round of funding from private equity investors.
In an earlier interview with VCCircle, Challu had said that the firm, mostly catering to the B2C market, is now planning to tap small and medium businesses (SMBs) in a big way across Indian and European markets. The firm is clocking $100 million in revenues.
In 2010, it raised $30 million in Series D funding, led by Sequoia Capital India. Existing investors Canaan Partners, SVB Capital Partners, SAP Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson also took part in that round. At the time, the company had announced that it would also be looking to list in the US within 6-12 months. However, it deferred the plan—due to a sluggish market—without specifying a time frame as to when it would look to do the same in the future.
In the US, iYogi competes with players like Geek Squad (a subsidiary of Best Buy, one of the leading US consumer electronics retailers) and PlumChoice, and in India, it competes with eTechies.
Earlier Madison had invested in Micromax Informatics Ltd (mobile handset maker) and Net 4 India Ltd (IP communication solutions and services provider) in 2010 and 2009, respectively.
(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)
