Source: tech.economictimes.indiatimes.com
Multiples Alternate Asset Management has invested $20 million (about Rs 142 crore) in artificial intelligence and big data company Quantiphi, the first deep- tech investment by the Renuka Ramnath-led private equity firm.
The investment, which has a small secondary component as well, is the first institutional funding round raised by the six-year-old Boston and Mumbai-based company, which offers applied artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data solutions to a host of Fortune 500 companies across sectors such as CPG, insurance, healthcare, retail, media and entertainment, ed-tech and technology.
Quantiphi was set up in 2013 by former Philips Healthcare senior executive Asif Hasan, Vivek Khemani, who was previously with Sasken Communication Technologies, and former Capgemini senior executives Reghu Hariharan and Ritesh Patel. It had previously raised an estimated $3.5 million in angel funding last year, and counts the likes of AWS, Coca Cola and Google, among its clientele.
“There are two or three areas where we will be deploying the capital — to deepen our market presence, expand our presence further in the US, and look at new markets in Europe, grow our sales team, expand our research and development functions as we look to solve increasingly complex problems, and strengthen the company’s management layer,” Khemani told ET.
The company’s Indian operations, which are based out of Mumbai and Bengaluru, drives its engineering excellence and delivery operations, particularly in the software 2.0 domain. The investment has been made from Multiples PE’s second fund, the 2015 vintage Plenty Private Equity Fund, which also has a co-investment vehicle of $135 million.
The investment in Quantiphi is the 11th, and final new transaction from the fund.
“It’s been our pursuit to find distinctive companies, and not one more me-too services company. It’s been great to find an Indian company, with a significant overseas presence, which is doing cutting edge work, and which has won the confidence of global tech giants,” Ramnath said.
According to her, Multiples PE, going forward, will be scouting for such technology bets for its third India dedicated fund, which has a corpus of $560 million, and has been backed by the likes of International Finance Corp, the private sector investment arm of the World Bank, and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, among others.
“We have shown a lot of flexibility on the ticket size, stage of the company and unusual concepts, such as Dream11. We have, therefore, been preparing Multiples to take these kinds of bets which are the best next-generation value creators,” Ramnath said.
