Helion Ventures invests in Gridstone

MUMBAI: Indian venture capital fund Helion Ventures has picked up a stake in Mumbai based research outsourcing firm Gridstone Research.

This is part of Gridstone's first round of funding. Helion Ventures had committed the investment, early this year, but has put in the money as its fund close in August '06. Boston based VC fund Charles River has also put money in Gridstone Research.

This is the third investment by Helion Ventures from its $140 m fund. Helion pumped in $ 2.2 m in JiGrahak a mobile payment company and also put money in travel portal company- makemytrip.com.

According to Ashish Gupta, managing director, Helion Ventures, "The first thing which attracted us to Gridstone was the team. Gridstone has an experienced team and they are capable of taking on any challenge."

Gridstone is led by Basab Pradhan and the cmopany has been developing a platform for facilitating high end research for fund managers in US. According to Mr Pradhan, "We have spent the last 15 months in developing the delivery platform and populating it with high end research content. We will begin by rolling out our productised service in Jan '2007, and will offer research in the vertical- technology services."