Shapoorjee Chandabhoy Finvest Pvt Ltd (SCFPL), a Mumbai-based NBFC looking at investing in early and growth stage companies, is considering an investment of $1 million (about Rs 4.7 crore) in Eki Communications Pvt Ltd, a Mumbai-based early stage company in IT and telecom space. SCFPL is picking up 20% stake in the firm.
With this, Farzan Ghadially, president, SCFPL, will join the Call Recall board. This is the first investment of SCFPL in this current financial year.
Call Recall is a flagship product of Eki Communications, a venture started by Mandar Vaidya along with partners Kavi Panjwani, Mahesh Labhe and Abhijit Deshpande. Vaidya has also formed an enterprise product development company in Mumbai called Revamp Consulting Pvt Ltd in which he is the CEO.
Call Recall is raising the fund to meet its working capital requirements, and expand its operation, Ghadially told VCCircle. The company will primarily target domestic expansion, and will later expand to overseas geographies. It is also exploring possibility to expand its offices in Delhi and Chennai in going forward.
Call Recall provides value added services (VAS) catering to industrial and business applications through mobile. It offers an interface that helps users to upload pictures, audio or video files on real time basis on the CRM server. Ghadially said, Call Recall was a profitable company.
SCFPL is a proprietary fund and is registered as a non banking finance corporation (NBFC) with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). It has a fund size of around Rs 350 crore, and around 20% of the corpus has been deployed so far. It looks at investment in between Rs 1 crore and Rs 25 crore, with a sweet spot of Rs 2-15 crore.
SCFPL is a sector-agnostic fund (other than real estate), and plans to invest in companies in pharmaceuticals, logistics, tourism and transportation. It plans to invest in around 5-6 companies in the current fiscal. “Around 2-3 deals are in the pipeline, and we are expecting to close one in the next quarter starting July this year,” Ghadially said.
SCFPL’s portfolio investments include Virat Industries Ltd, a listed company, and Armayesh Global Pvt Ltd. It also provides debt funding, and has exposure in number of companies, including Net4India Ltd, a network and application services provider.