I am continuing with the preceding post on how start ups in India can secure funds and customer leads from corporate venturing units that a lot of companies have. They are also often places which have the required domain expertise to assess your product and its fit to the parent company’s product roadmap which is great if you are collecting requirements, validating use cases and prioritizing on your own product’s features.
If you are looking to just sell products, then there is a much larger number of companies that have dedicated sourcing units for buying new technology. 
A good example is LG which has the LG Technology Centre in Europe which helped me get into LG Korea to sell. It’s Korean competitor, Samsung has a dedicated venture fund which like LG is interested in fuel cells, advanced materials, consumer products, home networking and multimedia platforms. 
I found dealing with Samsung Korea a nightmare because of the language problem, I guess their San Jose office is better for initiating discussions.
You can expect similar language issues to crop up while selling to Japanese companies as well although Toshiba, Mitsubishi, NEC, Sharp, Hitachi all have procurement units with fairly good english speaking people. We will try to get these companies on an online collaboration platform HeadStart is likely to announce during HeadStart 2009 to facilitate business and investment between Indian start ups and multinational corporations. 
Panasonic however has a dedicated venture unit with very good linkages to their Osaka Headquartered corporate technology units. Panasonic is interested in networked consumer electronic products, home appliances and semi-conductor technologies and they are the best people to assess if your technology or product can fit on to their often little known product roadmaps.
Moving away from Japan to Germany, SAP and Siemens run two very well established venture units. Robert Bosch also has a new technology procurement unit and their CTO’s office used to be very accessible but they do not have a venture unit. 
I have never dealt with SAP Ventures personally but Jai Das who is a SAP Ventures investment executive was on the review panel for HeadStart 2008’s nominations for enterprise products and services. I would presume SAP would be interested in most enterprise domains such as SoA applications, databases, storage, networking and development tools.
Siemens ventures has also got an office in Mumbai for some time. Rajesh Vakil is listed as the India representative and they list energy, healthcare and automation as their areas of interest. 
I ran into them while selling to their RFID business unit in Germany and I was trying to get some leads from Dr. Uwe Albrecht who is their managing partner. Eventually, Siemens Technology Center at Munich dealt with our initial presentations and for those willing to find out if new technology will interest them, they might be the best people to go to first.
I will continue this series with a concluding post on five other companies that I know have venturing units. There are also a couple of Indian companies that have dedicated venture funds and quite a few that invest when the right opportunity comes along, although they do not publicise such intentions.
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