In an interview with CNBC-TV18 Mark Mobius, Former Executive Chairman of Templeton Emerging Markets Group spoke about his reading of the market and his outlook.

We are very positive about India. We think India is now at the take-off stage and will probably surpass China in terms of growth going forward, he said.

Mark Mobius, former Executive Chairman at Templeton Emerging Markets Group, has joined the investment committee of Equanimity Investments.

Equanimity Investments is a venture capital fund that helps clients diversify their portfolios by investing in early stage businesses.

With the Indian equity market trading close to its top and the start-up and venture capital industry in India unable to deliver desired results, Rajesh Sehgal, ex-Franklin Templeton fund manager that used to handle private equity capital and a part of the emerging market groups at Franklin Templeton has ventured on its own to set up Equanimity Investments, a venture capital firm that would focus on investing in early stage growth company.

Mumbai-based venture capital firm Equanimity Investments has made the first close of its debut fund at Rs 70 crore ($10.8 million), founder Rajesh Sehgal said on Monday.

The milestone comes exactly a year after Sehgal floated the early-stage fund after leaving Franklin Templeton Investments.

According to Mr. Sehgal mentoring is an integral part of investing. If you are investing , you should input your experience to your capital through mentoring. Mentoring can help a startup to know how much interference is feasible from the investors side.A startup looking to be successful should keep a watch at portions apart from funding. He close his short yet fruitful talk by saying , “ With investing comes the added responsibility of mentoring”.

Rajesh Sehgal is a seasoned and well rounded investor, spending over 17 years working at Franklin Templeton India. Working with Dr. Mark Mobius since 1999, who managed the Emerging Markets Group at Franklin Templeton, helped shape his investment philosophy and inculcated a sense of rigorous investment discipline and deep portfolio optimization knowledge.

“We want to use our experience with financial services to build a fund with superior portfolio management capabilities, to help startups with strategy and future fund raising requirements,” says Sehgal

Equanimity founder Rajesh Sehgal has racked up eight exits out of which only one has been a write-offthe remaining seven have multiplied his initial corpus four times

As lucrative as this may be, startup investing is in equal measure risky. What if you had, instead, invested Rs 10 lakh in Flipkart? Sure, you would have seen outsized returns had you exited when the e-commerce player’s valuation peaked at $15.5 billion in 2015. But it has since lost almost 65 percent of its value, having been marked down by various investors. Or, say, you had put your money in a startup that later folded up, like PepperTap, an on-demand grocery service? You’d have lost every penny.

Former senior executive director at Franklin Templeton Investments Rajesh Sehgal has upped his bet on tech ventures, going beyond angel investing to launch his own fund that has secured commitments…

In conversation with industry experts :

Rajesh Sehgal - Senior Executive Director, Head- Private Equity, South Asia, Middle East & Africa, Franklin Templeton India (Moderator) Dhiraj Poddar - Co-Head India, TA Associates Sandeep Reddy - Co-founder, Peepul Capital Sanjay Nath - Co-founder & Managing Partner, Blume Ventures