Infosys Ltd, the country’s second-largest software services exporter, is selling its entire stake in Delaware, US-based ANSR Consulting Holdings Inc., which helps multinational companies to bring global in-house or captive units to India.
The company will offload its entire stake in ANSR for $1 million (Rs 6.4 crore), it said in a stock market disclosure.
The IT services giant had bought a stake of around 5% in ANSR two years ago for $1.4 million (then Rs 9 crore).
This deal had marked the first investment by Infosys from its $250 million Innovate in India fund. This fund was carved out of a larger $500 million corpus earmarked to invest in global startups.
ANSR was launched by Lalit Ahuja, a former CEO of the Indian IT and back-office arm of global retailer Target, almost a decade ago.
In December 2012, ANSR had launched global startup accelerator Kyron. The accelerator had incubated over a dozen startups, including Shopping Wish, Lost Click Found, Buzzinga, Teritree, Book Pad Tech, My Window, Admirch Media Labs, Spatio Viz, Buzz Anytime, Link My Sport and Get Out, among others.
Infosys has invested in several startups across the world in the past through its Innovation Fund.
In 2016, the fund had invested in UNSILO, a Danish artificial intelligence startup focussed on advanced text analysis, besides US-based big data startup TidalScale.
Other investments from the fund include Israel-based cloud monitoring solutions startup Cloudyn Software Ltd, San Francisco-based data visualisation startup Trifacta Inc, and Delaware-based big data startup Waterline Data Science Inc.
Last year, Infosys had also invested $4.62 million in the maiden fund of homegrown early-stage venture capital firm Stellaris Venture Partners, which was launched by three former executives at Helion Venture Partners, through the Innovation Fund.
