Wipro Ventures invests in US-based cyber security startup Vectra

Wipro Ventures, the $100 million strategic investment arm of Wipro Ltd, has invested an undisclosed amount of funding in US-based cyber security company Vectra Networks Inc. for a minority stake.

"Wipro completed this investment in March 2016 and plans to go to market with Vectra jointly with its cyber security and risk services practice offerings," Wipro said in an email reply to Techcircle.in.

Founded in 2011, Vectra is backed by marquee investors such as Khosla Ventures, Accel Partners, IA Ventures, Intel Capital, AME Cloud Ventures, and DAG Ventures. Vectra focuses on advanced persistent threat domain and provides real-time detection of in-progress cyber attacks.

The Economic Times had first reported the development.

A query sent to Vectra on the details of the investment, however, did not elicit any response till the time of filing this report.

Wipro's VC arm invests $1-5 million per financing round in early- to mid-stage startups in India, Israel and the US. It invests in areas such as open source, Big Data and analytics, artificial intelligence, digital, Internet of Things and security.

Last month, Wipro Ventures had picked up a minority stake in another US-based security startup, Emailage Corporation.

In February, Pune-based Altizon Systems, which operates a technology platform for developing industrial IoT solutions, raised $4 million in Series A funding led by Wipro Ventures and Lumis Partners.

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

In March 2015, Wipro Ventures agreed to acquire a minority stake in Drivestream Inc, a US-based management and IT consulting firm specialising in Oracle Cloud services, for $5 million.

The latest investment from Wipro comes at a time when arch-rival Infosys is also betting big on new-age tech startups. Yesterday, Infosys invested in Silicon Valley-based data visualisation startup Trifacta. The deal marks the eighth investment by Infosys' $500 million innovation fund that seeks to back startups that develop innovative technologies on automation, IoT and AI. Earlier this year, Infosys invested $4 million in Waterline Data Science.