The Indian subsidiary of the leading venture capital firm, Sequoia Capital, has announced an equity investment of US$20 million in the Amalgamated Bean Coffee Trading Co. Ltd., which owns the Café Coffee Day chain. A Sequoia Capital press release made this announcement.

Amalgamated Beans will use this infusion of funds to supplement its business with a fast growing, high margin line of products and services and will work on developing a larger international and national footprint for itself. K. P. Balaraj, Managing Director, Sequoia Capital India, will join the company's board as part of the investment.

V. G. Siddhartha, Chairman, Amalgamated Beans, said, "We are pleased to have Sequoia Capital on board as an investor and look forward to their experience in helping achieve our business objectives. We are actively looking for well-managed companies in the US and European markets that we can partner with or acquire to help build a diversified, global business."

Apart from the retail café chain, Amalgamated Beans owns Coffee Day Xpress (retail fast food and beverage outlets), Coffee Day Take Away (coffee vending machines) as well as Coffee Day Fresh'n' Ground (coffee powder stores), Coffee Day Exports and Coffee Day FMCG (packaged filter coffee).

Since 1972, Sequoia Capital has provided startup venture capital to some of the biggest names in the IT business today, establishing its reputation as the "entrepreneurs behind the entrepreneurs". The venture capital firm's partners have worked with Sandy Lerner and Len Bozack of Cisco Systems, Jerry Yang and David Filo of Yahoo!, Gaurav Garg of Redback Networks, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Larry Ellison of Oracle and Steve Jobs of Apple Computer. The companies organised by Sequoia now account for about 10% of the value of NASDAQ.