IT major Infosys Ltd has invested $15 million (Rs 94 crore) in an unnamed firm related to NASDAQ-listed DreamWorks Animation, as per separate media reports citing the company's chief Vishal Sikka.
Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference held at San Francisco on Tuesday, Sikka said this unit has brought its animation technology to industries like retail among others.
He added that as of now Infosys is the only external investor in this company.
Media reports said Infosys has invested in a DreamWorks' spin-off. However, DreamWorks is yet to make disclosure on any such spin-offs.
Although the name of the firm was not disclosed, Infosys is currently working with a company called Clique Intelligence, which is backed by DreamWorks and HP. This firm had last year raised around $5 million from these two companies and was to raise a further $15 million. Infosys spokesperson said the firm has not invested in Clique but the Indian IT firm has only partnered it.
Redwood City-based Clique, which was set up by former HP executives among others including two senior executives of Indian origin, provides contextual collaboration technology for bridging enterprise communication. Media reports had said DreamWorks has registered the domain name for Clique's website.
Meanwhile, Infosys' investment comes three months after it announced a strategic engineering partnership with DreamWorks Animation.
In that partnership, the two companies said they intend to work together to further develop DreamWorks’ technologies to bring them to wider use. Infosys is to deploy its global talent pool available across cloud, Big Data, Java and open source capabilities to develop next generation solutions based on the DreamWorks technology.
DreamWorks Animation is engaged in production of animation movies. It was spun off as a public listed firm from DreamWorks Studios.
This $15 million investment by Infosys is arguably the first investment from the global innovation fund worth $500 million which was set up to provide financing to startups and new ideas in the field of next generation technology.
The Bangalore-headquartered company has been focusing on IP-related products, platforms and solutions (PPS) business as part of its proposed ‘Infosys 3.0’ strategy, which is mainly aimed at widening the focus and looking to move higher in the value chain.
In August last year, Sikka took over as the first non-founder CEO of Infosys and laid down plans to transform the troubled tech company by working with the startup community, further strengthening intellectual property, products and platforms and also finding new software opportunities with clients.
(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)
