Infosys invests USD 62 million in start-ups from USD 500 million innovation fund

US tech giant Infosys has invested a little over USD 62 million from its USD 500 million innovation fund in start-ups covering areas like IoT, automation and drones.

The fund was set up in 2013 with a corpus of USD 100 million for start-ups and other innovative businesses outside the company. The size of the fund was expanded to USD 500 million in January, 2015.

"The start-up world is incredibly exciting. We have been investing in companies there. We have been bringing these companies to our clients and that rate at which we bring these companies to clients is just exploding. So that's very exciting," Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka told PTI.       He added that USD 62.18 million has been spent from innovation fund so far.

Infosys has invested in a dozen start-ups including Stellaris Venture Partners, Unsilo, Trifacta, Cloudyn and TidalScale using the fund.

These investments could play a major role in helping Infosys reach its "aspirational goal" of USD 20 billion revenues by 2020. Sikka has said about USD 1.5 billion will come from acquisitions, while about USD 2 billion will come from newer services to increase revenue per employee to USD 80,000 and an operating margin of 30 per cent.

Infosys is focusing aggressively on new services like design thinking, solutions in artificial intelligence and intellectual property-led businesses that are expected to account for at least 10 per cent of its revenues.

"Few weeks ago we did a large deal with one of our banking clients where we brought two of our companies that we have invested in into building a solution for them around big data, cloud infrastructure and so this is a very exciting time, we are working with start-ups," Sikka said.

Asked if the company was looking at further expanding the corpus, he said while the company is "always thinking about that but right now, we haven't come close to exhausting that USD 500 million fund".