Dell’s venture capital arm to invest on Indian ventures

By Raaghav G R

Posted on October 28, 2016

The combined corporate venture capital arm of Dell and EMC will do investments globally, including in India, a senior company executive said. Scott Darling, president of Dell Technologie’s ­ venture capital and corporate development arm, responsible for mergers and acquisitions said the combined entity now enjoys a stronger financial muscle, enabling it to look at more ‘aggressive’ investments. “We now have more capital available for investments than some of our competitors”, Scott Darling added.

“Michael Dell (CEO of Dell) is encouraging me to step up the pace of investments in a rational fashion. We are active investors and actually are pretty aggressive in investments for our size. We have just brought the teams together in India”, said Scott Darling. “We are enthusiastic believers in the IT industry in India. I have some proposals for investments from India on my desk as we speak. The proposals include an enterprise infrastructure deal in the storage space and a SaaS company”, Scott Darling said.

He said his VC arm typically looks at 400-500 proposals a year. “We are not a pure financial investor. Anything we invest in, we obviously want it to do well. But it also needs to be strategically aligned to us as a company in the areas we are interested in”, Scott Darling said, without quantifying the proposals. The broad domains that their VC arm is looking to invest in globally include: storage, virtualization, cloud computing and big data.

Indian startups could do with a little help from investments, especially from a reputed company like Dell. I personally believe the blend of an established firm and an innovative startup will work wonders for both. Startups have creative, educated and hard – working people working for them and just require funds in the form of capitals, investments or bonds and a media platform (like websites or television or radio etcetera) to help them expand and grow. Established companies like Dell can help them in that regard by investing on startups. Meanwhile, established companies like Dell can also use the innovative ideas of a startup to design a more robust and modern software or end – product. India is a country where there is abundance of talent, especially software talent. Domains like cloud computing, Big Data, virtualization and storage have tremendous scope for growth in India. If an established company like Dell learns an innovative idea from an Indian startup, it could possibly implement it in various technologies like cloud computing and Big Data to achieve marvelous and state – of – the – art software or end –product and the Indian startup could also grow its reputation from advertisements in Dells media platforms. Hence it will be a win – win situation for both. It is heartening to see the Indian government reach out and give suggestions on investments to an MNC like Dell. If the investments come through in the mentioned domains and if Indian startups benefit from it (through investments from Dell) then it would give a huge boost to the Indian economy and generate millions of jobs, thereby improving the quality of life of Indian citizens. Read more on Startups

Dell’s venture capital arm to invest on Indian ventures