GLOBAL investment banks are scrambling to get a piece of the action from India’s booming technology startups, having missed out on the initial flurry of deal-making to their better-connected but much smaller domestic rivals.

    Banks such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Citigroup and Morgan Stanley are looking to hire more bankers in India and are now regularly attending “bake-offs” to pitch for advisory roles on deals, according to several banking industry sources.

    Foreign money has been pouring into India’s fast-growing e-commerce sector, with investors ranging from Japan’s Softbank Corp. to Singapore’s Temasek Holdings and GIC Private Ltd. piling in.

    Many large global investment banks have stayed away from work in the emerging sector though due to the relatively small deal sizes.

    Now they are stepping up efforts to build relationships while the companies are still young — learning lessons from China where many of them are struggling to compete with small boutique banks as Internet deals pick up speed.

    “Several of these companies will be large IPO candidates in the next 12 to 24 months, so the big banks have to start positioning themselves for this,” said Harish HV, a partner in India at advisory firm Grant Thornton.

    The number of venture funding deals for technology startups in India in the first quarter of 2015 was the highest in nine quarters and exceeded the number of such deals in China, according to data from CB Insights. The total value of investments in India topped US$1 billion for the third straight quarter.

    To compete with local rivals like Avendus Capital and Kotak Mahindra Capital, foreign banks are now pitching for relatively small deals at startups, hopeful they will eventually lead to more lucrative work, banking sources said.

    Avendus, which focused on the tech sector before the deal momentum picked up, ranks fourth in the advisory league table for announced technology deals in India so far this year. That’s ahead of bigger global rivals, including Credit Suisse, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and JPMorgan, according to Thomson Reuters data.(SD-Agencies)