Ratan Tata backs Sabeer Bhatia's Sabse Tech

Tata Sons chairman emeritus Ratan Tata has invested an undisclosed amount in Sabse Technologies Inc, a US-based firm started by Hotmail.com co-founder Sabeer Bhatia.

This would be Tata's 14th known investment in a new-age technology startup after retiring as Tata Sons' chief three years ago.

The Economic Times first reported the development, quoting Bhatia and Sabse co-founder Yogesh Patel.

Sabse officials did not immediately respond to a Techircle.in query for more details.

Founded by Bhatia and Patel in 2008, Sabse is a voice over internet protocol (VoIP) services firm. Its first product was Sabsebolo – a cloud-based voice conferencing and fax-to-email service. The company later acquired Jaxtr Inc, Mobivox and Vysr.

Jaxtr is a social communication venture that allows users to send text messages and make international calls at lower rates over 3G or Wi-Fi. Mobivox is a hosted PBX and voice conferencing provider while Vysr is an online voice/text communication tool.

The India-born Bhatia founded Hotmail in 1996 and sold it next year to Microsoft for $400 million, making it one of the biggest online success stories. But, the 46-year-old Bhatia never tasted that big a success again.

Ratan Tata, after retiring from Tata Sons, has been one of India's most active startup investors. He has been building a portfolio of new-age businesses across sectors ranging from consumer internet – particularly in e-commerce – to social impact, e-health and clean-tech sectors.

Tata made his first investment, in Swasth India services, in January 2014, according to VCCEdge, the data research platform of VCCircle. Since then he has invested in many marquee startups including Ola, Snapdeal, Xiaomi, Paytm and Urban Ladder. Recently, he invested an undisclosed amount in an expanded Series A round raised by Abra, a bitcoin-powered remittance app. Tata is also on the advisory board of Kalaari Capital, IDG Ventures and Jungle Ventures.