Homegrown handset maker Micromax Informatics Ltd has invested an undisclosed sum in consumer technology and artificial intelligence-based startup One Labs, a company statement said.
One Labs operates inOne, a platform that aggregates apps across multiple genres in food, shopping, travel, deals, cabs, news, recharge, games and more. Among the 50 apps that it hosts include Zomato, Ola, Uber, Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal and others.
The company has also created an AI-enabled voice/chatbot solution called One Assistant which packages services provided on inOne in a virtual assistant format.
One Labs will use the funds to further develop its product. It will also open inOne to third-party developers over the next 12 months. Besides, inOne will be pre-embedded in Micromax devices, the statement added.
“At Micromax our emphasis is to drive innovations through software and services that would add a layer to the device eco-system. A large chunk of our efforts are now concentrated on coming up with products and services which act as solutions to the needs of the fast-evolving consumers,†Vikas Jain, co-founder of Micromax said in the statement.
Red Ginger Technologies Pvt. Ltd, which runs One Labs, was founded in 2015 by Rahul Gupta, Ankit Sharma and Aashish Gupta.
While Rahul is an alumnus of IIT Kanpur and IIM Bangalore, Sharma and Aashish are engineering graduates from Punjab Engineering College.
One Labs had previously raised seed funding from Puneet Gupta, an executive director at Goldman Sachs; Savio Joseph, director at UBS Investment Bank; and Vinay Gupta, executive director of DBS Bank.
Micromax’s recent investments
Other companies that Micromax has invested in include shopping and savings discovery app Scandid, which was done in 2016.
In April 2016, along with venture capital fund IDFC SPICE, it led the $15-million Series C round into digital payments firm TranServ.
In November 2016, private equity firm Madison India Capital, which picked a small stake in Micromax, was looking to hike its holding in the company.
Its investments from 2015 include Times Internet’s music streaming app Gaana, online travel search engine ixigo.com, and health and fitness app HealthifyMe.