Company
BUNDEEP SINGH RANGAR is the Founder and COO of Ariadne Capital.
He follows a tradition of VCs such as Richard Gourlay, Stewart Alsop, Tim Jackson and Victor Basta, who learned how to spot good companies as journalists. Founded in December 2000 by Rangar and Julie Meyer, Ariadne Capital is a European venture capital group that helps companies access capital, secure top talent and build revenue by finding customers and key commercial partners. To accomplish this, Ariadne attempts to leverage an institutionalized network that is maintained in a proprietary knowledge management system. Its investors include entrepreneurs such as Martin Velasco, Roman Stanek, Candace Johnson, Wayne Lochner, Gerard Huber, Michele Appendino, Gerard Bonnevay, Susan Dark and Peter Wakeham.

 

Tell Tornado Insider about your latest deal:
"An investment in the world's first peer-to-peer casino software company discovered among students at a technical university. It is revolutionizing the casino industry, akin to what eBay did to the auction industry. For the first time in casino history, players get 'house' odds previously only available to casino dealers and operators."

In addition to investment capital, we have helped the company secure important strategic partnerships with Lycos (www.lycos.co.uk/gaming) and LastMinute that helped the company break even within three months of it going live. Partnerships with targeted gaming channels are currently being negotiated. The value of our investment has increased 3 1/2 times in less than a year."

 

What sectors are interesting at the moment?
"The sectors we are targeting with high growth potential include software that enhances 'business intelligence' and management of unstructured data; tools for Web Services; online gaming/casino software; P2P applications; mobile commerce and infotainment; 3G infrastructure components, security technologies, bioinformatics, telematics and mobile devices."

 

What is your short-term outlook for venture capital?
"The short-term outlook of venture capital is one that requires continuous 'hands on' involvement to help companies grow and scale through private capital and revenue growth with few opportunities for public offerings and investment exits. Undervalued assets make this an interesting time for low valuation investment opportunities and buy-out activities."

 

Envy list:
"Three companies I wished I had funded include:

Systinet (Czech Republic) - founded by Roman Stanek, serial entrepreneur from Prague, the Czech Republic. The company is building the toolkit (a la the picks and shovels) for helping large enterprises build Web Services and transform existing IT investments to a Web Services platform. Web Services is a hot area that's chased by leading industry players such as Sun MicroSystems and Microsoft Corp.

Instranet (France) -- founded by Alex Dayon and Jean-Noël Grandval, both former senior executives of Business Objects, a worldwide leader in business intelligence. With InStranet, Dayon and Grandval are applying their pioneering work in business intelligence to enterprise-level software that enables the exchange of mission-critical, service-related documents and content with business partners in a secure, organized environment.

KVS (U.K.) - a former Compaq engineering team led by Nigel Dutt, its founder and CTO, KVS provides an Email Archiving Solution for use with Microsoft Exchange. Our customers have deployed this proven Exchange Archiving solution to solve the storage issues created by the explosion in messaging whilst dramatically reducing total cost of ownership. Enterprise Vault enables more efficient and effective use of major knowledge assets --documents and electronic mail -- by managing their archiving, retention, and retrieval in a seamless manner."