Narayana Murthy's wife sells 2 mn Infy shares for his fund

Sudha Murthy, wife of Infosys chairman and chief mentor N R Narayana Murthy, who was instrumental in seeding Infosys Technologies almost three decades ago by providing her husband the initial capital, has done it again.

Sudha Murthy, who holds 1.62 per cent in Infosys, has offloaded 2 million shares (about 22 per cent of her personal holding) worth Rs 447.92 crore (Rs 4.48 billion) to help Murthy set up his venture capital fund.

Last month, Murthy had sold 800,000 shares to raise about Rs 174 crore (Rs 1.74 billion) to start a venture capital fund, named Catamaran Venture Fund. Post this sale, Murthy's holding in Infosys had fallen from 0.55 per cent to 0.41 per cent.

It is understood that with on Thursday's fund-raising, Murthy has decided to close the fund, which will now have a corpus of Rs 600 crore (Rs 6 billion), which is enough for an angel or an early stage fund what Murthy had intended to set up. The fund would now be operational, sources added.

After announcing his plan to launch the fund, Murthy had indicated that he would think about further fund-raising at an "appropriate time."

Murthy said the fund would primarily look at early-stage investments or angel funding.

"The objective will be to look at opportunities offered by entrepreneurs in a wide variety of fields, a broad spectrum of fields. I don't want to limit it to one field like hi-tech or retail. In India, if you limit yourself to one area, the number of opportunities is not as high as elsewhere," Murthy said earlier. He said it might take a few more months to put this plan into action.

Murthy, who is now the non-executive chairman and chief mentor of Infosys, is set to retire after he attains the age of 65 in August 2011. After that, he won't hold any position in the company's board, either executive or non-executive, which is going to be a standard practice going forward.