NEA-IndoUS Closing First Fund

NEA-IndoUS Ventures expects to hold a final close on an inaugural fund of $175 million in mid-April, firm co-founder Vinod Dham told PE Week. (subscribers can read full story here).

The new firm focuses on early stage opportunities in India. New Enterprise Associates is the fund’s primary limited partner and has lent its acronym as a prefix. “Most of the money is from friends and now from VCs that made money off the first fund,” Dham says.

Dham, father of Intel’s Pentium Processor, says he decided to become a venture capitalist in India to give back to the country that educated him at nearly no cost. “This is really sort of payback time for me,” he says. “I came back with the conviction that we had to create more entrepreneurs there. I decided the best way to do that was become a VC.”