Wipro Ventures gets $200 mn from parent to invest in new age startups

Wipro Ventures, the investment arm of Wipro, which invests in early- to mid-stage enterprise software startups, has received $200 million from its parent company as part of the fourth funding round to focus more on new-age companies.

 

The company, which has invested in 37 companies to date across financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and hi-tech, has also put money into 10 funds in the US, Israel, and India.

 

The fund will be utilised for three to five investments every year and will focus on new opportunity areas such as generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and cybersecurity.

 

“It will be around cloud infrastructure, data and cybersecurity, and AI. With the advent of GenAI and at the cusp of wider adoption of the technology by enterprises, we see this as an opportune time to increase our investments in and promote GenAI-based applications for our customers,” Biplab Adhya, managing partner of Wipro Ventures, said.

 

With its first fund of $100 million, Wipro Ventures invested in 15 startups. That included Demisto, a security operations platform that was bought by cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks, and Moogsoft, an AI operations company acquired by Dell.

 

"An area that we have not invested in and are looking at keenly is how to secure GenAI applications. When GenAI-based applications are being deployed, that opens up a new vector for cybersecurity, allowing bad actors to attack companies. And there are companies that are building solutions to protect against those specific vectors. So that might be an area we dive into. There might be areas where new language models are being built, which are domain-specific and hosted within the enterprise. That could be another area of interest,” added Adhya.

 

Wipro Ventures, which usually invests about $3 million to $7 million in startups, connects Wipro and its clients to a global ecosystem of startups working on disruptive technologies, enabling Wipro’s clients to access the latest innovations while providing startups with access to a global network of enterprise customers.

 

Wipro chief executive Srini Pallia said, “This latest investment reaffirms our commitment to helping startups grow faster, innovate, and collaborate with the IT services industry to support large enterprises.”