Axon Partners joins Madison India & others to invest $28M in Series E funding in iYogi

International investment firm Axon Partners Group has joined Madison India Capital and a group of other unnamed investors to invest $28 million in a Series E round of funding in Gurgaon- and New York-based iYogi Technical Services Pvt Ltd, a provider of remote and on-site tech support services to consumers and small businesses. The proceeds from this round will be used to support iYogi's growth in Spain and Latin America through partnerships with telecom companies.

This round was started early this year with Madison India, a mid-market PE firm focused on media, communications & business services, infusing an undisclosed amount in iYogi for a minority stake.

"It's great to have Axon Partners Group on board, as their presence will help accelerate our expansion into Latin America. Spanish is the second most popular language across the globe and key markets across the Latin American region are witnessing rapid growth in devices, which presents a tremendous growth opportunity. We plan to initially focus on the four geographies in this region," iYogi's co-founder and CEO Uday Challu said.

Techcircle.in was the first to report that iYogi was in talks to raise $60 million in a pre-IPO round from private equity investors.

Set up in 2007 by Challu and Vishal Dhar (president - marketing), iYogi is a provider of online subscription-based technical support services offered directly to consumers and small businesses across a range of computing and communications devices and software. Challu is a graduate in Economics from Delhi University and has close to three decades of experience in the IT industry.

In the past, he had co-founded Concordia Consulting and IQ Resource, a niche outsourcing company with a focus on B2B media. His partner Dhar was CEO of Friday Corp, prior to co-founding iYogi. Earlier, he was managing director at Text100 India, and was also part of the founding team at IQ Resource.

Leveraging its digital service cloud platform, iYogi delivers on-demand support services to subscribers globally. The company also recently launched on-ground support services across the continental US. iYogi's customer base is spread across the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and the GCC, and the company mainly competes with Geek Squad (a subsidiary of Best Buy, one of the leading US consumer electronics retailers) and PlumChoice in the US, and eTechies in India.

In December 2010, iYogi had raised $30 million in Series D round of funding led by Sequoia Capital India. At the time, the company had announced that it would also be looking to list in the US within 12 months. However, it deferred the plan—due to a sluggish market—without specifying a time frame as to when the company would look to do the same in the future.

Axon Partners Group, an emerging markets specialist, manages over $180 million in funds worldwide. It also manages The India Opportunities Fund, through which it is has already invested in online restaurant reservation firm JustEat India. Axon says that iYogi is its fourth investment in India. However, the names of its other portfolio companies are not disclosed.

"Technology is one of the hot investment areas and is one of Axon's core investment focuses worldwide, so we believe that iYogi represents a great opportunity for our investors," said Francisco Velázquez de Cuéllar, president of Axon Partners Group. "iYogi is our fourth investment in India and we look forward to supporting the team in their expansion into new business verticals across the different geographies, specially Europe, Latin America and some African countries."

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)