Wipro all set to invest in start-ups

After setting up the VC fund, company in advanced stage of making minority investments in couple of tech firms

Wipro, the Bangalore-based IT services company which had set up a separate venture capital fund is pretty close to making a couple of investments in innovative start-up companies. Announcements to this effect are expected anytime soon, T K Kurien, CEO of the Bangalore-based company told Business Standard.

"You will see some announcements soon," Kurien said. "All of those will be minority investments because we don't want to acquire companies and kill them. The idea is to make investment which are small, effective and which can help us improve our business," he added.

In July this year, Business Standard had reported that Wipro had set up a venture capital (VC) fund with an initial corpus of around $100 million (around Rs 600 crore) with an aim of investing in early-to-middle stage technology startups globally. The fund is currently being spearheaded by Rishad Premji, the chief strategy officer who is also the elder son of chairman Azim Premji.

It is reliably learnt that the team that is managing the fund has been meeting the start-up companies independently as well as with the help of various startup incubators launched by industry body Nasscom as well as various global companies. Rishad Premji himself is learnt to have visited Nasscom start-up warehouses in several occasions in the recent months.

Last month, a team of practice heads from Wipro visited Microsoft Ventures office in Bangalore meet and assess software product startups. According to sources privy to that development, Wipro is following a model wherein it wants to explore new revenue streams by making such investment while at the same time keeping the portfolio companies at an 'arm's length'.

While the floating of a VC fund to make investment in startups is a recent development at Wipro, the company has already done couple of successful investments in a few global technology companies. The company has already seen a successful exit when Axeda, a machine-to-machine technology provider wherein it had invested $5 million in June 2013 got acquired by PTC in July this year. This week, the company also announced making further investments in Opera Solutions LLC, a global big data and analytics company. With the latest round of investment of $8.2 million, Wipro's has increased its stake in Opera to close to 20 per cent with a total investment of around $53 million.