Industrial IoT startup Altizon gets $4M from Wipro's VC arm, others

Pune-based Altizon Systems Pvt Ltd, which operates a technology platform for developing industrial IoT (internet of things) solutions, has raised $4 million (around Rs 27.2 crore) in Series A funding led by Wipro Ventures and Lumis Partners.

Altizon's current investors, The Hive and Infuse Ventures, also put money in this round, it said in a statement.

For Wipro Ventures, which is IT major Wipro Ltd's $100-million corporate venture fund, this is the third startup investment since its launch in September 2014. According to a stock exchange disclosure by Wipro, it has invested Rs 9.78 crore for under 20 per cent stake in Altizon. The deal would be sealed before February 10, it said.

Altizon will use the funds raised to scale up its sales and marketing globally.

In 2014, Altizon had closed a seed round of funding from The Hive India, Infuse Ventures and Persistent Ventures.

In financial year 2014-15, Altizon's revenue stood at Rs 30 lakh.

Altizon was founded in 2013 by Vinay Nathan, Ranjit Nair and Yogesh Kulkarni. Nathan holds an MS degree in computer science from the University of Southern California and had earlier worked at Persistent Systems as VP- sales (APAC and Middle East). Nair had earlier worked as a software development manager at Amazon, while Kulkarni was previously director (cloud) at BMC Software. Both Nair and Kulkarni are alumni of University of Pune.

Its flagship product, the Datonis IoT platform, helps enterprises build IoT products in a few weeks. The startup provides services around device connectivity, device management and big data analytics, besides alerting and monitoring services.

Altizon is focused on the industrial internet, which offers a scalable platform to manufacturers to build intelligent connected devices and manage them from the cloud. The startup has a set of sensor data appliances and software development kits (SDKs) that drive data from sensors in industrial equipment to its flagship Datonis platform, which provides a device and performs large-scale data ingestion and aggregation utilising big data technologies.

In August 2015, Wipro Ventures had invested in US-based Vicarious, a robotics startup that enables computers to achieve human-level intelligence.

Before that, Wipro Ventures agreed to acquire a minority equity stake in Drivestream Inc, a US-based management and IT consulting firm specialising in Oracle cloud services, for $5 million.

Wipro Ltd, recently acquired US-based Viteos Group for $130 million in cash.

India's second-largest IT services firm Infosys Ltd had recently invested $4 million in Delaware-based startup Waterline Data Science Inc, which helps companies make sense of large data sets.