SAIF Partners Invests In Vocational Training Firm ICA Infotech

Private equity fund SAIF Partners has invested an undisclosed amount in Kolkata based vocational training institute ICA Infotech Ltd. ICA is a leading provider of job-oriented vocational training to arts and commerce stream graduates in the non-IT segment. It provides courses in accounting, finance and personality development through some 300 plus study centres across the country. It also has several other courses in the pipeline such as retail and stock trading. ICA was founded in 1999-2000 by Narendra Shyamsukha, who is the chairman and managing director.The company claims to have provided training to over 35,000 students during the last fiscal year. It plans to almost double this number in the current year. The market opportunity here is fresh college graduates are still not ready to be employed unless they go through a vocational training programme. Despite this gap, the education and training space outside the regular colleges and universities has largely remained unorganised. There are only few large companies like ICA in the non-IT training sector.Ravi Adusumalli, General Partner, SAIF Partners, justifies the investment, “Historically, India has been behind the curve on training and education aspects of manpower development. As the economy develops further, the gap between the need and the availability of trained workforce is only getting wider. ICA plans to take advantage of this opportunity.”Also Indian training space has been dominated by IT related vocational training institutes like NIIT and IIHT (hardware). But non-IT related training segment has remained largely untapped.Babar Khan, Vice President, led the deal for SAIF Partners. This is the fifteenth investment of SAIF Partners in India. It has earlier invested in companies like National Stock Exchange, Sify, IL&FS Investsmart, Intelligroup, Makemytrip.com, HomeShop18, JustDial, and SlashSupport, among others.