Jataayu Acquisition Completed
By Kamla Bhatt • Dec 20th, 2007Category: Bangalore, Business, Entrepreneur Interviews, Ideas, India, Internet and Telecom, Merger & Acquisition, Mobile, Podcast, Technology
It is a done deal now. Jataayu’s acquisition by Bharti Telesoft is complete. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, which means we have to wait and see if this was an outright purchase or not, and how much Bharti Telesoft paid for this acquisition. A while ago Economic Times mentioned that the acquisition was in the neighborhood of $20 million.
Bangalore-based Jataayu was an early player in the mobile space when it released its WAP and mobile handset applications. Jataayu was the first Indian company to make a WAP server. For sometime now Jataayu has been looking for growth capital to expand its business. For Bharti Telesoft the acquisition of Jataayu is part of their growth strategy. Bharti Telesoft is a subsidiary of Bharti Enterprise and is a leading supplier of value added service (VAS) platform for wireless and wireline services. A couple of years ago Bharti Telesoft sold 10 percent of its stake to WestBridge (now Sequoia Capital India), Sequoia Capital and Cisco Systems.
Last year I interviewed Mahesh Jain, managing director Jataayu, where he spoke about his company and the challenges that Jataayu faced during the telecom meltdown of 2001-2002. Jataayu got its initial round of money from Tata Consultancy Services and GE Capital. This interview was conducted before the Indian telecom subscriber rate was still growing at a moderate rate and not this multi-million per month subscription rate.
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