Wipro Ltd announced it has invested $2.02 million in Avaamo Inc and picked up a 20% minority stake on a diluted basis in the US-based artificial intelligence computing platform.
In a BSE filing, the company stated, “Investment of $2.02 million in this tranche through a fresh infusion of funds into Avaamo.” Reports suggest that the tech giant might convert convertible notes previously issued and add to the initial funding taking the grand total investment to $3.02 million.
Soon after announcing its investment in Avaamo Inc., Wipro rose 0.66% to Rs 295.20 on BSE at 9:22 IST.
Wipro’s consolidated net profit fell 11.85% to Rs 1920.10 crore on 1.82% growth in net sales to Rs 13669 crore in Q3 December 2017 over Q2 September 2017.
Avaamo is an artificial intelligence-driven enterprise platform based in Los Altos and founded in 2014 by Ram Menon and Sriram Chakravarthy. The company also has an office in Bengaluru and specializes in designing and deploying enterprise bots to their customers and employees in the corporate sector in minimal time.
Wipro Ventures is the strategic investment arm of Wipro Ltd. primarily investing in early to mid-stage startups that develop new technologies and ideas in India, Israel, and the US. They usually finance between $1 million and $10 million in a single round, depending on the startup they are investing in. Lately, they have massively invested in the developing sectors of FinTech, Healthcare IT, etc… They also focus their investments primarily in domains like AI, big data and analytics, cloud infrastructure, IoT (Internet of Things) and security.
Previously in November 2017, Wipro Ventures acquired the minority stake in HeadSpin Inc as well. The startup based in California provides an app testing platform. The funding’s amount, however, remained confidential. The investment firm giant also invested in American cybersecurity firm Vectra Networks delivering automatic ‘Threat Hunting as-a-service’. As for investments in India, in February 2016, Wipro invested 9.76 crores in Altizon for a minority stake in the Pune-based big data startup. Among other tech companies, Wipro Ventures also invested in Vicarious, a robotics startup and Emailage Corporation, a risk and fraud prevention firm.