Wipro Ventures doubles down on enterprise technology bets with $150 mn Fund II

Wipro Ventures, the investment arm of Bengaluru headquartered information technology (IT) services giant Wipro, has launched a second fund with a $150 million corpus.

The new fund will back early-to-mid-stage companies in the enterprise software solutions space across geographies, according to a statement.

The first fund of the venture capital arm had a $100 million corpus and funded companies in key areas of AI (artificial intelligence), Big Data and analytics, cloud infrastructure, financial technology, healthcare, Internet of Things and cybersecurity.

With the new fund, the venture will continue investing in companies in cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure and AI apart from its new focus areas, which are application development and test automation.

Launched in 2015, Wipro Ventures has invested in 16 companies across the US, Israel and India. It has also backed five venture capital funds focused on the enterprise technology segment in New York and Los Angeles.

The fund’s sole India investment is in modern data management platform Imanis Data (formerly Talena), which has a development centre in Pune. 

Managed by Wipro veteran Biplab Adhya and Venu Pemmaraju, Wipro Ventures invests in companies which align with the strategic initiatives of the IT services provider. 

Pemmaraju was earlier an investment director at Intel Capital, chipmaker Intel’s venture capital arm.

 “Wipro Ventures has become an integral part of our innovation ecosystem. Our strategy has been to invest in promising enterprise software startups, establish strategic partnerships with them and bring their leading-edge solutions to our customers. By doing this, we differentiate our customer services, generate revenue for our portfolio companies and deliver strategic as well as financial returns to Wipro,” Abidali Z Neemuchwala, CEO of Wipro said. 

Wipro’s approach to making strategic investments for frontier technology is in line with other enterprise companies. In November 2019, Salesforce Ventures, the investment arm of the global CRM company announced its second Consultant Trailblazer Fund with a corpus of $50 million to back next generation global cloud consulting companies.  

The venture capital arm of networking technology company Cisco has also been active in mergers, acquisitions and investing in frontier technology companies apart from acting as limited partners in Indian venture capital firms.