Wipro Ventures invests in app-testing co
BENGALURU: Wipro Ventures has invested an undisclosed sum in Headspin Inc., a San Franciscobased mobile app testing startup that counts Google Ventures as one of its backers.
It’s the 13th investment by the $100 million corporate venture arm of Wipro Ltd, India’s third largest software services firm.
Headspin offers a mobile testing platform for an application developer or a startup to test and fix bugs, without writing any code, before the app is released to the public. Headspin, which claims to be present in 75 countries, has labs in Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai.
Manish Lachwani, who founded Headspin in 2015 along with Brian Colwell, earlier ran another app testing start-up, Appurfiy, which was bought by Google in 2014.
An email sent to Lachwani seeking comment went unanswered.
“Wipro Ventures has made a minority investment in Headspin. Headspin provides a mobile application performance management platform that enables quality engineering on global mobile networks and allows for remote testing on real devices on real networks across the globe. This platform will augment Wipro’s mobile testing and quality assurance services,” said a company spokesperson.
Wipro Ventures, which is overseen by Rishad Premji, Wipro’s chief strategy officer and director, started operations in 2015 and has invested over $32 million in 11 start-ups and two venture capital firms.
Ten of Wipro Ventures’s 13 investments are in the US, two in Israel and one in India, a Punebased big-data startup called Altizon Systems.
Rival Infosys Ltd has invested in nine start-ups and two venture capital firms, although the $500 million Infosys Innovation Fund has not made any investment since January this year. Infosys’s non-executive chairman, Nandan Nilekani, who returned to the company a week after CEO Vishal Sikka resigned on August 18, is still to appoint a leader to manage the fund, after the earlier MD of the corporate venture arm, Yusuf Bashir, quit.
Socially enabled business processes, mobility, data analytics and cloud computing are reshaping the way companies, globally, have relied on technology for doing business, and for this reason, they want their IT vendors to offer smart solutions in the space when they are bidding for outsourcing deals.
At Wipro, digital revenue accounted for 24.1% of its $2.01 billion revenue in July-september. Demand from these new-age solutions rose 9.1% sequentially in the September quarter, against 2.1% dollar revenue growth posted by the company.