Warburg Pincus India MD Nitin Nayar resigns, to float own venture fund

American private equity major Warburg Pincus India managing director Nitin Nayar has resigned from the firm. He is planning to launch his own investment fund that will primarily focus on technology.

According to the ET report, Nayar's new fund is expected to have a corpus of $150-200 million and is likely to make mid-to growth-stage investments across the country's broader technology space, particularly in the enterprise technology segment.

Nayar was involved in the Warburg Pincus' Indian affiliate's investment advisory activities in India. He served as a Principal at Warburg Pincus until January 30, 2012. Prior to this, he was a Business Development Manager at Epoch Partners and worked in the Technology Investment Banking Group at Merrill Lynch.

In his 15 year career, Nayar led Warburg's investments in cloud-based customer engagement and retail solutions firm Capillary Technologies and MXC Solutions India, which owns and operates online and mobile-based auto classifieds platform CarTrade, among others.

Nayar had played a leading role in structuring Warburg Pincus' investment in online classifieds company Quikr in 2012.

Warbug Pincus is headquartered in New York and has offices in Beijing, Hong Kong, London, Mumbai, San Francisco, São Paulo, Shanghai, and Singapore, with administrative offices in Amsterdam, Luxembourg, and Mauritius.

It focuses on investments in the consumer, industrial, media, technology, telecommunications, logistics sectors such as Avaya, Bharti Tele-Ventures, Harbour Networks, NeuStar, PayScale, CleanMax Solar and Telcordia.

In September 2017, Ecom Express raised Rs 192 crore from the global private equity firm and its existing investor Warburg Pincus. Previously, Warburg had invested $75 million in Rivigo and third-party logistics company Stellar Value Chain.

Besides logistics and IT, the PE firm invested $413 million in seven companies – including, auto portal CarTrade.com, Laurus Labs and Kalyan Jewellers, during 2014.