Indian IT's Titans Attempt to Expand Horizons with AI Startups

In 2015, when not many were aware of Open AI, Infosys was one of the first investors to come forward and invest in the company, along with the likes of Elon Musk, Amazon Web Services, and others. This came as a shock to many, as Indian IT companies are not known for investing in AI startups, especially the big ones. 

However, when they do, they are bound to go big. For instance, while investing in OpenAI, the then Infosys chief Vishal Sikka had said that he was doing so because most of Infosys’ work is “in building and maintaining software systems".

Sikka believed that AI would increasingly shape the construction and evolution of intelligent software systems, a phenomenon that we see happening now with the rise of coding assistants like Github Copilot and Amazon Code Whisperer. 

GitHub Copilot, along with a couple of other coding assistants, has been shown to reduce more than 50% of the work of developers. Andrej Karpathy, the founding member of OpenAI and ex-director of AI at Tesla, also says that the Copilot has accelerated his coding and it will be hard to go back to ‘manual coding’. According to him, Copilot writes close to 80% of his codes with nearly 80% accuracy. 

https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1608895189078380544

As of now, Infosys has exited OpenAI; however, there are a couple of companies in Infosys’ portfolio that can go as big as OpenAI did. Let’s look at them and where other IT biggies like Tech Mahindra and Wipro are currently investing. 

Infosys

The name ‘Infosys’ is hard to imagine being associated with military; however, Infosys has invested in a UAV solutions company, 'Ideaforge', which the Indian Armed forces have actively used for surveillance, crowd monitoring and rescue operations. 

Currently, Ideaforge has a total of seven drones in operation. Two of them are used for mapping applications like land surveys, volumetric estimation and more, while four of them are used for security purposes like border security, anti-terror and crime control. 

Another interesting investment that Infosys has made is in the company called TidalScale, which is working in the direction of combining multiple physical servers into a single virtual server. The company claims to deliver in-memory performance at any scale, using standard hardware and being compatible with all applications and operating systems. 

Recently, TidalScale was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

Tech Mahindra

Tech Mahindra is one of the few Indian IT companies betting big on metaverse and working towards it. Last year, the company launched 'TechMVerse' to drive commerce in the Metaverse. Nevertheless, the company also has a few interesting investments in its portfolio. 

Tech Mahindra has invested in multiple creative companies that are known for their online presence and engaging campaigns. One of them is Born Group, a global ad agency which is present in several countries and, with it, Tech Mahindra aims to reinforce its focus on digital and enhance its expertise in the creative, content and commerce space.

Additionally, the company has also made a significant investment in ‘The Bio Agency’, another company working in the creative field. 

Another interesting investment Tech Mahindra has made is in the field of Healthcare IT consulting is the HCI Group. It is a global systems integrator which claims to implement, optimise, support, and maintain healthcare solutions for hospitals and care delivery organisations worldwide. The company provides services such as EHR Consulting and Services, Managed Application Services, End-User Services, and more. 

Wipro

Out of all Indian IT companies, Wipro perhaps has the largest portfolio when it comes to AI startup investments. The company has invested in a wide spectrum of companies, including Avaamo, a deep-learning software company that claims to specialise in conversational interfaces to solve specific high-impact problems in the enterprise.

Avaamo builds fundamental AI technology across a broad area of neural networks, speech synthesis, and deep learning to make conversational computing for the enterprise a reality.

Another investment Wipro has made in the field of mobile app performance management. The company's name is Headspin, which claims to provide mobile application developers, carrier networks, device OEMs, and CDN providers detailed visibility into user experience issues across every layer of the mobile ecosystem through its mobile experience platform (MEP). 

Additionally, the company has also invested in an analytics platform called Incorta, which claims to deliver a hyper-converged analytics platform that speeds up an enterprise’s time to insights. Incorta claims that its platform can deliver new reports within minutes instead of weeks, and businesses can make more accurate and timely decisions.