Bangalore-based early stage technology focused venture capital firm Ojas Venture Partners has made a venture capital investment in city based Mango Technologies. The company provides application framework and user interface solutions to ultra-low cost phones (below Rs 2,000). Mango has developed a thinnest modular application & UI framework, which considerably reduces engineering effort and time spent on development and integration. “Mango Technologies is hardcore product technology company,†said Rajesh Srivastha, Managing Partner, Ojas Venture Partners, confirming the development to VC Circle. The terms of the investment and the size of the transaction remain undisclosed.
Who Are They?
Mango was founded in 2006 by Sunil Maheshwari and Lekh Joshi, who have worked with various platform providers such as Motorola, Reliance Infocomm and Quasar Innovations. The company has a rapidly expanding 24 people team based out of Bangalore. Mango was incubated at the NSR Entrepreneurship cell at IIM, Bangalore and won the NASSCOM innovation award earlier this year. Now it is working closely with a mobile proprietary platform and a phone using Mango platform can be expected in the market in next six months, said Srivastha.
What They Do?
When mobile proprietary platforms develop a low cost phone, they take the existing operating system and application framework and dumb it down for low cost phone. Now to reduce costs they use hardware that is a cheaper substitute, but the amount of processing power is still higher. This is where Mango Technologies steps in providing the application software so that the cheaper handsets have better UI and are not as sluggish. “This would allow mobile platforms to develop ultra-low cost phones that looks and feels like a higher cost phone,†said Srivastha.
Also the technology developed by Mango opens up big opportunity for VAS (value added services) applications in the low cost phones. “From our due diligence of Mango, we found that what they had is one-fifth of what is available in the world market,†added Srivastha. “As compared to the international players in the market we beleive that Mango has two distinct advantages. First is the amount of memory that they use and second is the amount of processing power this technology takes,†explained Srivastha.
Ojas Upbeat On Mobile Segment
“Currently we are seeing a lot of opportunity in the mobile segment,†said Srivastha. Mango Technologies is the third investment of Ojas Venture Partners, which is backed by Raghavan S Nadathur, the co-founder and former JMD of Infosys. Earlier this year Ojas had invested in in mobile payment/banking company Tyfone Inc. Before that it invested in Ziva Software which is engaged in the area of products and services in the mobile search domain. Ojas, which is investing out of a $35 million fund, is primarily focusing on technology pan-India and also looks at some consumer services.
“We are also seeing a few opportunities in semiconductor segment. We have also seen a lot of opportunities in the SAS, ERP and CRM space, but we haven’t found anything that I think is scalabe enough, and we are also looking at a couple of opportunities in the cleantech space,†added Srivastha.
