FT on SONG’s first two investments

As some of you know, CEMS is a knowledge partner to the SONG fund, which we helped set up with the Soros Economic Development Fund, Omidyar Network and Google, who are the investors in the fund. SONG made its first two investments in education and healthcare in 2010. Here is the Financial Times’ coverage of the investments.

“We set up a partnership with the investors out of a conviction that business schools have to go beyond their traditional boundaries to support the development of a profitable small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) sector that has an outsized social impact,” says Ajit Rangnekar, dean at the ISB.
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“We want to focus on sectors that can contribute significantly to the socio-economic development of India, such as education, healthcare, agriculture and housing,” he (Reuben Abraham) says.
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Big funds’ lack of interest in small ventures attracted the attention of Song, which has seen opportunities in the largely untapped bottom of the pyramid investment segment. At present, Song, which manages a $17m fund, has invested roughly $4m in two projects.

Together with Sequoia Capital, the venture capital group that helped launch Google in the 1990s, it backs K12 Techno Services, a school management company focused on providing affordable schooling in south India. “The plan is to create a teaching and school management scheme that can be taken across India and implemented at very low cost,” says Kartik Srivatsa, an investment manager at Song who oversees the project. Song’s other major investment has been in Eye Q Vision, a chain of high-quality, low-cost eyecare hospitals based in the north of India.