US Norwest Venture Invests $15 Million in Indian IT Firm

America’s leading venture fund Norwest Venture Partners has invested $15 million (Rs 74 crore) in Manthan Systems for an unspecified equity stake in the Bangalore-based business intelligence and analytics solutions provider.

"We plan to use this third (C) round of funding to help retailers gain advantage over competition by unveiling slew of products and exploring acquisitions for leveraging our domain expertise in BI (business intelligence) and analytics," Manthan founder and chief executive Atul Jalan said.

With cutting edge analytics solutions for global retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) organizations, Manthan's software products transform the way its clients adopt, deploy and employ analytics and impact their profitability and growth.

Earlier, the nine-year-old privately-held company raised $10 million in 2007 from institutional venture capitalists IDG Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) and eplanet Ventures and $15 million in 2009 from Fidelity Ventures and the first round partners.

Manthan also plans to foray into cloud computing and software as a service (Saas) with a new suite of offerings and enable mobility for its products, including its flagship enterprise product ARC.

The company has a client base of 70 retailers across 20 countries the world over. Among Manthan's global clients are McDonald's, Crocs, Ecco, Love's, Ashley Stewart, Teavana, Robinsons, Ripley, Woolworth, SM Retail, Mydin, Abenson, Haggen and GAME Group Plc.

As a global venture and growth equity investment firm with $3.7-billion capital, Norwest makes early to late stage venture and growth equity investments in diverse sectors such as IT, business services, financial services, infrastructure, technology-enabled services and consumer.