Infosys invests Rs 14.5 crore in Danish artificial intelligence start-up

Invested in 10 start-ups so far; this is the second investment within a month

Bangalore-based Infosys on Friday announced that it has invested Rs 14.5 crore (DKK 14,920,000) in a Danish-based artificial intelligence start-up UNSILO. The investment is done through Infosys innovation fund.

An advanced text analysis start-up, UNSILO analyses large quantities of text and improve the speed and effectiveness of knowledge workers across many industries. UNSILO’s key clients include Science, Technology & Medical (STM) publishers currently. Better track record in entrepreneurial success and good education system have prompted Infosys, second largest software exporter of India, to look at Denmark.  

This is the second investment in a month, last week, Infosys invested an undisclosed amount in California-based TidalScale, a big data analytics firm.  

“UNSILO has built an impressive semantic search engine with best-in-class text intelligence, which powers a range of advanced business processes. We will partner with UNSILO to bring their artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to our global clients,” said Ritika Suri, executive vice-president & global head of Corporate Development & Ventures at Infosys. The investment will be completed after receiving the regulatory approvals, Infosys said in a statement.

The Infosys innovation fund, which was set up in 2013 with a corpus of $500 million, focuses on start-up that work in new technologies like artificial intelligence. Vishal Sikka, the first non-founder chief executive of Infosys, has repeatedly talked about building new capabilities within the company in the recent past, as the industry as a whole witnessed major shift from traditional technologies to emerging technologies like cloud, digital. 

Analysts said that this is an investment “on the right direction” at a right price, since Infosys is already working on a lot of text analytics projects. However, it may not see immediate impact on the revenue. “Directionally this is a brilliant investment given the fact a lot of enterprises are using text analytics. But we have to see its scalability considering the large number of clients Infosys caters to. Also, immediate monetisation from UNSILO may not happen,” Sanchit Gogia, founder and chief executive of Greyhound Research said.          

This will be the 10th investment by Infosys innovation fund in a start-up since 2015. These include both direct and indirect investment. Other than investing directly, Infosys has also partnered with other venture funds. For instance, in 2015 it backed Silicon Valley based Vertex Ventures.

It is not just Infosys that is wanting totap into the start-up eco-system as the companies battle the technology disruption that has hit the IT services industry. One of Infosys’s rivals, Wipro, is also focusing on investing in start-ups that does work on emerging technologies. It has so far made eight investments in start-ups and already committed to spend around $22 million for FY17 through Wipro Ventures capital fund. The total corpus of the fund is $100 million. Wipro, on an average, looks at about 5 to 8 start-ups a week.