'Projects are better thought through today'

Axcend Group, a VC firm headquartered in Canada, opened office in Bangalore a
couple of months ago. Axcend India will focus on the emerging telecommunication
technologies. Initially, the company plans to invest in a minimum of three
companies in India. Bruce Wehlau, chief executive officer, Axcend India, on the
developments so far:

At a time when investment has slowed down, with VCs having burnt their
fingers, why are you entering the scene?

The entry of Axcend had been planned for some time and the economic slowdown
was not seen as a reason to postpone our entry date. We believe that the adverse
economic times actually works to our advantage in that in the short term there
is probably less competition. Also, proposals that do come forward are probably
better thought through. And, we have no legacy of underperforming investments to
carry and worry about.

How much stake would you like to hold in the funded company?

We have no targets, preferring to judge each opportunity on its merits.
However, given the early stage focus of Axcend, it would be natural for us to
seek stakes commensurate with the perceived risk.

What technology areas are you looking at?

In order to play to the strengths of Acrodex, our North American sister
company, we focus on wireless, wireline and telecommunications enterprise
solutions.

Have you closed any deals so far? Would you like to share the details?

Since our official opening on 23 October 2001 we have closed no deals. We
have reviewed a large number, over half of which were in our chosen space. We
are currently performing advanced due diligence on a limited number of prospects
that we filtered from initial conversations.

How many proposals were submitted to you, and how many of them have you
shortlisted after the filtering process?

Since starting operations in late October we have reviewed over 50
proposals. Six of them were taken to a second round of due diligence.

Deepak Kumar