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IDG Ventures India invests in Manthan Systems

21- Mar- 2007, Bangalore IDG Ventures India, a $150 Million early-stage technology venture capital fund, today announced its first round of investment in Manthan Systems, a Retail Industry focused Business Intelligence and Analytics software products company. Mr. Sudhir Sethi, Vice Chairman and Managing Director, IDG Ventures India, will join the Board of Directors of Manthan Systems. “As a fund strategy one of our key investment areas is software products, within which the briskly growing BI and Analytics market with projected 2010 size of $10 billion is very encouraging. We find Manthan to be a highly differentiated and leading edge player in offering domain centric solutions to this global market. It already counts Fortune 500 companies amongst its clientele and is well poised to become the market leader. The company’s management team has retail domain expertise par excellence and is led by Mr. Atul Jalan, a very successful serial entrepreneur. ” said Mr. Sudhir Sethi, Vice Chairman and Managing Director, IDG Ventures India. "The investment by IDG would help Manthan to realise its vision of being a global leader in retail analytics. The IDG Platform and the IDG Ventures India investment team led by Sudhir’s presence on our Board of Directors will bring immense value beyond capital. This combined value-add will accelerate the process of achieving global scale and competitiveness." said Mr. Atul Jalan, Managing Director and CEO, Manthan Systems. The IDG Platform is focused on technology globally and comprises market research, publications and conferences as well as a network of other IDG Ventures’ funds across Asia and the United States.  Mr. Sethihas over 25 years of operating, investment and Board experience with Walden, Wipro, HCL, Mindtree Consulting and Infotech Enterprises amongst others. “We intend to invest increasingly in more software product companies like Manthan. In the Business Intelligence and Analytics area in Telecom, Finance, Industrial Analytics amongst others we would be looking at acquisitions and investment opportunities” added Mr. Sudhir Sethi. “The fund raised from IDG Ventures would be utilized to build the sales team and product development teams and road maps with a view to rapidly tap into this large global opportunity in the Business Analytics arena.” continued Mr Atul Jalan, “We expect to add over 100 people to the company in sales, marketing and development in 2007”.   Manthan Systems has formidable retail industry expertise and it develops and markets a suite of software products and services to global retailers enabling them to take data-driven business decisions. Manthan’s business intelligence platform delivers enterprise-wide analytics capability with dramatically superior performance when compared with competitive options. With a hybrid portfolio of products and services, Manthan is able to offer in addition end-to-end data warehousing and business intelligence capability to its customers. The retailers have traditionally not leveraged their data rich environment to drive decision making. One of the biggest challenges facing businesses today is the disconnect between the strategy created and the execution of specific initiatives. For retail and consumer goods industry there is lack of  technologies or methodologies that measures and manages the gap between strategy formulation and execution effectiveness. Manthan provides retailers with the tools they need to measure performance, pinpoint the source of exceptions and understand the relationships between customer groups, products, promotions, and multi-channels. Businesses who have implemented Manthan products have seen improved margins, customer retention, inventory efficiency, promotion effectiveness and wallet share while having reduced markdowns. About IDG Ventures IDG Ventures is a global network of venture capital funds with over $1 billion under management. It has a portfolio of 220 investee companies built over the last 15 years. The IDG Ventures network is comprised of five independent partnerships managing funds in North America, China, Vietnam, and now India. Each partnership makes investments on behalf of its Limited Partners, including its principal investor and sponsor, International Data Group (IDG), the world's largest IT media company. By combining the IDG platform – an unparalleled combination of global publishing, market research (IDC), and conferences and exhibition resources – with years of hands-on experience in early-stage company building, each IDG Ventures Fund helps their investee companies understand their markets better and penetrate them faster than their competition. Additional information is available at www.idgventures.com

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