Ajay Relan, for long the managing director and India head of Citi Venture Capital International (CVCI), the private equity business spun off from Citigroup Inc., has been bitten by the “entrepreneurial bug”. In his first media interview to Mint after stepping down from CVCI last fortnight, Relan discusses the new fund — of between $500-$750 million — that he is going to start, and why he is happy that it comes at a time when stocks at the Bombay Stock Exchange are not at near-25,000 levels.
“We are going to raise a private equity (PE) fund. There is me and Jayanta Basu (a former vice-president at CVCI India), who has been a colleague of mine in CVCI since 2000. We parted ways by mutual agreement from Citi. Now, we are in the process of setting up a PE fund of our own and doing pretty much what we are good at doing, which is investing in growth capital. We will be opening our office shortly, around October.” added Relan