Father of Pentium returns for an encore

But what makes him proud is that Nevis is the first Indian product company from the place where he was born — Pune — that is going to revolutionise the enterprise network security system.

‘‘The good thing is that it’s not doing it by making use of cheap labour, but using intellectual property. Pune is expanding… we would like to do more companies from Pune,’’ he said.

‘‘I never thought I’ll find so many people out here (in Pune to do the high-end work). Companies like Nevis will put Pune on the world map and more success stories will follow,’’ Dham said.

He admitted that three-four years ago, India was doing a great job and building IT services companies. ‘‘But they were using labour arbitrage models (read cheap labour) to build them. So, I thought I should do what I do best — building companies and products.’’

So, Pune-born Dham decided it was payback time and plunged headlong into setting up product companies from India. But there are two things he feels India still lacks: talent and access to global market.

‘‘During my three weeks in India, I have met 17 companies in Pune, Mumbai and Delhi. They are fresh out of school, full of ideas but they lack management talent and how to scale up the company,’’ he said.

Dham’s NewPath Ventures that will raise a $250 million kitty in round-II for investment, will be looking at 20 companies. Currently, NewPath has invested in four Indian companies — Nevis Networks, inSilica, Telesima Communications, the fourth will be made public soon — and all follow the cross-border model: 80 per cent people in India and 20 per cent in the US to access capital, market and customers.

Out of the box?

Supernova is the chip that powers the network security product developed by Nevis Networks. It’s a box that can be hooked on to a network so that servers and data is protected. ‘‘We lock down the local area network (LAN) by it… it has the deepest and fastest threat detection,’’ said Vinod Dham. The security box also protects servers from viruses, spams, trojans. ‘‘Nevis is breaking new ground. It has created an architecture that will be to networking what Pentium was to the PC industry,’’ he added.