PremjiInvest may lead $50M fresh investment in grocery e-tailer BigBasket

PremjiInvest, the private investment arm of Wipro Ltd chairman Azim Premji, is in discussions to lead a $50 million (Rs 312 crore) Series C investment round in Bangalore-based SuperMarket Grocery Supplies, which owns and operates online groceries marketplace – BigBasket.com  sources told VCCircle.


According to senior investment bankers who are aware of the discussions, this fresh round of funding is expected to be wrapped within three months.


Request for views on the development from the management of BigBasket and PremjiInvest did not elicit any response.


This comes within seven months of BigBasket raising Rs 200 crore ($32.9 million) in its Series B round of funding from a clutch of investors including Helion Venture Partners and Mumbai-based Zodius Capital.


The round also saw participations from its existing investors, including Ascent Capital; Srihari Kumar, founding partner of Singapore-based hedge fund LionRock Capital and former partner at TPG-Axon; and serial entrepreneur K Ganesh.


After establishing its presence in its home market Bangalore, it has expanded into Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai. It is expected to enter Delhi soon.


The firm still has cash from the last round but would need a larger stash not just to enter new markets but to create a war-chest to fight fresh competitors, including some which follow an asset-light hyper-local grocery delivery marketplace.


In the grocery e-commerce space ZopNow raised $10 million from Dragoneer Investment Group with participation from the existing investors Accel Partners, Qualcomm Ventures and Times Internet. ZopNow, which earlier competed head on with BigBasket, has pivoted to become an asset-light business and partners with offline hypermarket chain HyperCity to pick products and deliver to consumers who order online.


Then there are a bunch of delivery startups which essentially connects users to local grocers. Grofers raised $45 million across two rounds since January this year; PepperTap raised $10 million while LocalBanya also got fresh funding.


BigBasket is understood to have closed FY15 with a top-line of Rs 250 crore, with a run-rate of 6,000 orders a day with average billing of Rs 1,500 per customer.


It had generated sales of around Rs 70 crore in the year ended March 31, 2014, according to VCCEdge, the data research platform of VCCircle.


For PremjiInvest, if it manages to wrap up the funding in BigBasket, the deal will come as another bet in the booming e-commerce sector in India.


It has investments in horizontal e-commerce marketplace Snapdeal and had earlier backed lifestyle e-commerce venture Myntra, which was later acquired by Flipkart.


PremjiInvest has been actively investing in the internet and new generation tech space in both India and abroad. Most recently it backed Policybazaar in the country.


Last month, it led a $80 million funding round in Silicon Valley-based Cyanogen Inc, a mobile operating system (OS) developer which customises Google's Android OS for its clients.


In February, it joined others in a $115 million investment round in California-based Zuora Inc, which runs a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based subscription billing and financial solutions venture. Last year, it invested in another US-based software firm Datastax Inc.


Indeed, PremjiInvest was also reportedly in talks to invest in BigBasket last year itself. However, the deal was finally inked with other investors.


The firm, which burnt its fingers in the retail sector with an investment in Subhiksha, a firm which went bust, has built a significant exposure to the offline retailing sector too.


It invested in Future Lifestyle Fashions Ltd last year and also counts Tata's retail arm Trent Ltd as a portfolio firm.

Infosys invests $2M in US-based clean-tech startup Airviz, launches incubator, to buy m-commerce enabler Kallidus

After enhancing its startup fund five-fold to $500 million in January, Infosys has now committed its second early stage investment – $2 million in US-based personal air quality monitor Airviz.


The first investment from the fund christened ‘Infosys Innovation Fund’ was $15 million in in a spin-off from California-based Dreamworks Animation in February. The name of that venture was not disclosed.


Meanwhile, Infosys said it will pick up a minority stake in Airviz. Airviz Speck, an affordable, fine particulate monitor, which uses patent-pending technology from Carnegie Mellon University, can empower individuals and communities to understand and identify health hazards related to air quality.


Though the first two startup investments by Infosys are in the US, it has plans to invest in India too. The company has set up $250 million Innovate in India Fund for home-grown startups.


It has also announced launch of Infosys Incubator. Although this incubator is part of the innovation fund, Infosys has not shared further details on the operations of the initiative.


It is the latest among many initiatives the company has undertaken of late towards increasing its engagement with startups.


In another development, the firm said it will buy m-commerce enabler Kallidus Inc for $120 million in an all cash deal. Kallidus operates under its key product Skava.


“Skava delivers a cloud hosted platform for mobile websites, apps, and other digital shopping experiences across mobile, tablet, desktop, in-store, and all emerging channels to large retail clients worldwide,” said Infosys in a statement.


This comes just two months after it acquired Israeli automation technology provider Panaya for $200 million in mid-February.


Under Vishal Sikka, the first non-founder chief of Infosys who took charge in August 2014, Infosys has shown its intent to pursue acquisitions to better use its huge cash chest of over $5 billion. Its cash reserve came down from $5.53 billion to $5.21 billion as of end March. Before Panaya, its last – and biggest ever – acquisition was SAP specialist company Lodestone in 2012.


Meanwhile, Infosys was the biggest loser among blue chip stocks on Friday with lower than expected financial performance for the fourth quarter ended March 31, 2015.

Factory girl turned Apple supplier is China’s richest woman

Zhou Qunfei, the chairwoman of a Chinese touchscreen glass supplier firm that has clients like Apple and Samsung, has been crowned China’s richest woman, with a fortune of nearly US$ 8 billion.

Dubbed as the “Queen of Mobile Phone Glass”, the 25-year-old has ousted Chan Laiwa, founder of Beijing Red Sandalwood Cultural Foundation, who was previously named China’s richest woman with total assets of US$ 6.1 billion according to a global billionaire list by Forbes released last month.

Zhaou’s firm Lens Technology’s share value surged to 78.08 yuan per share yesterday, jumping by the daily limit for 10 straight days since it debuted on the Growth Enterprise Market board in Shenzhen on March 18, with an offering price of 22.99 yuan per share.

This morning, Lens Technology, a major Apple Inc supplier, saw its share value surge by the daily limit for the 11th day at 85.89 yuan per share, extending the glory of the country’s richest woman, state-run Xinhua news agency reported today.

Lens Technology makes glass covers for various consumer electronic products such as smartphones, computers and cameras.

Its sales revenue to Apple and Samsung reached nine billion yuan in 2014, accounting for more than 70 per cent of the company’s total revenue.

Zhou’s life is a classic rags to riches story.

Born in 1970 in a small village in central China’s Hunan Province, she started working as a factory girl making glass for watches in China’s southern city of Shenzhen.

In 2003, she founded her own company. Headquartered in her hometown Hunan, the company has now grown to include 10 subsidiary companies with locations all over China, and employs 60,000 people.

She once told the press that she contributed her success to “hard work” and “persistence“.

Despite of the company’s good performance in the stock market, analysts have also expressed some concern on the company’s ability to sustain profitability.

After posting a net profit of 2 billion yuan in 2012, Lens technology saw net profit drop to 1.17 billion yuan in 2014.

Lens Technology is highly reliant on major clients such as Apple and Samsung. Between 2012 and 2014, the combined sales to the two industry giants took up more than 70 per cent of the company’s entire sales revenue.

 

Nevertheless, the company has announced recently that it provides glass for Apple’s newly launched Apple Watch.

Gujarat start-up’s clean energy line-up for rural India

Greenway Grameen Infra, whose high-efficiency smokeless biomass stove is making waves, plans to launch a stove that generates power like an inverter, and a water chiller in the country’s rural areas where electricity is a problem.

The startup, launched five years ago, has reached Mexico with its smokeless stoves and expects to quadruple its export of about 2,000 units a month in the next couple of years, its co-founder said.

“Our new prototype of a power-run water chiller, which can also run on solar energy, is being tested now. The other new product, a stove that generates electricity, the poor man’s inverter, should be launched later this year,” Neha Juneja, Co-Founder, Greenway, told BusinessLine on Tuesday. Taking an unconventional route to make cleaner and smarter stoves for nearly 15 crore Indian households surviving below the poverty line (BPL), Neha Juneja and Ankit Mathur, both MBA graduates, set up India’s largest biomass cook stove factory at Vadodara, Gujarat, in 2010.With a capacity to make eight lakh “chulhas” (stoves), that use wood and agro-waste as fuel, it has already sold over 2.60 lakh stoves across India, mainly in the southern states, since 2012.

“We now plan to tie up with public sector banks and micro-finance companies to penetrate rural markets more deeply, particularly in Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana,” she said.

The Mumbai-headquartered company has already tied up with microfinance institutions (MFIs) in Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. “This assured repayment of loans and helped us reach out to more villagers. In Kerala, for instance, we sold over 70,000 stoves through MFIs, with most buyers paying only Rs. 65 per week.”

Greenway Grameen Infra, a start-up of the IIM-Ahmadabad’s technology business incubator, the Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), evolved as a profitable product design and distribution start-up, aiming to serve rural India through quality-of-life-enhancing home-appliances. With its biomass cook stove, it aims to replace use of traditional mud stoves (chulhas), that adversely affect health and environment and achieve greater scale.

“Our flagship product, the Greenway Smart Stove, is a high-efficiency cook stove that burns all biomass fuels (wood, cow dung, etc.) while reducing smoke by 70 per cent, fuel use by 65 per cent and GHG emissions by 1.5 tonnes per annum,” she said.

Currently, the firm markets two stoves of different sizes, priced at Rs. 1,399 and Rs. 2,499. The idea of Greenway Cook Stoves was born when Mathur and Juneja, fresh from IIM-Ahmadabad and FMS Delhi, were traveling through rural areas to undertake energy projects. The stoves are also certified by the Union Ministry of New and Renewable Energy Resources and some subsidy made available in tribal areas.

Greenway was one of the two Indian companies to have won the Ashden Clean Energy for Women and Girls Award at the International Ashden Awards 2014. It received seed funding of Rs. 20 lakh from CIIE and another Rs. 40 lakh from an angel investor. In addition, the Clinton Global Initiative’s Global Alliance for Cook Stoves, headed by Hillary Clinton, also contributed Rs. 1 crore.