Infosys has invested $2.1 million in UNSILO, a Danish start-up focused on Artificial Intelligence and advanced text analysis.
UNSILO is founded by Mads Rydahl, who was the head of product design at Siri, which was later acquired by Apple. This is the third investment made by India’s second largest software exporter — after undisclosed investments made in Trifacta, a data analytics provider and Cloudyn — a start-up that enables corporates to monitor their cloud computing usage.
Infosys did not disclose the nature of investment such as the amount of stake it gets in the start-up but said that UNSILO’s uses a ‘unique’ combination of machine-learning and natural language processing to analyse large quantities of text can improve productivity of knowledge workers across many industries.
“We will partner with UNSILO to bring their Artificial Intelligence and machine learning technology to our global clients,” said Ritika Suri, Executive Vice-President & Global Head of Corporate Development & Ventures at Infosys.
These investments are a part of CEO Vishal Sikka’s $500-million fund, which would invest in areas where the company does not have adequate capability at present.
Also, these efforts are an effort to take the company towards the ‘aspirational’ $20- billion target by 2020-21. Since taking over, Sikka has made acquisitions, along with investments in start-ups like UNSILO.
Infosys acquired e-commerce services provider Kallidus for $120 million, bought SaaS (software-as-a-service) firm Panaya for $200 million and acquired Noah Consulting for $70 million, since Sikka took over.
These efforts taken by Infosys is also to improve their margins and be relevant to their customers who are all looking at new technologies to improve productivity.
A couple of days back, Nasscom reduced its annual revenue growth guidance for the sector to 8-10 per cent. In the recently reported quarterly results, Infosys reduced its guidance for a second consecutive quarter. Others like Cognizant has cut its revenue guidance three times this year.