Wilson Sonsini: VCs going to China & India at unprecedented rate

Jonathan Axelrad

Jonathan Axelrad is a lawyer at Silicon Valley’s elite law firm, Wilson Sonsini. He helps some of the area’s best venture capital firms put their funds together.

What he told us the other day stuck with us — perhaps because of the mix of both excitement and alarm we detected in his voice. His desk is piled with papers he is preparing for new venture capital firms focused on investing into China and India, he said. “In the 1990s, money was coming from all over the world to be invested here,” he said. “Now investors are using us to raise funds to spend abroad. It’s the exporting of U.S capital to those countries.” Over the past several weeks, he’s wrapped up four venture firms focused on India, and two focused on China.

“Whether it’s a bubble or not, that’s another question,” he says.

In related news, here’s the recent NYT story quoting executives at Silicon Valley Bank, which is based in Santa Clara, and which provides consulting services to venture capital firms. They said they are they are seeing twice as many Indian start-ups looking for capital investment than even a few months ago. “Our technology and private equity clients are leveraging India at an unprecedented rate,” said Kenneth P. Wilcox, chief executive of SVB.

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