BackWipro Ventures invests in app-testing firm Headspin
Wipro Ventures invests an undisclosed amount for a minority stake in Headspin, a San Francisco-based mobile app testing start-up
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Bengaluru: Wipro Ventures has invested an undisclosed sum in Headspin Inc., a San Francisco-based mobile app testing start-up 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 start-up 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 Pune-based big-data start-up called Altizon Systems Pvt. Ltd.
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 chief executive Vishal Sikka resigned on 18 August, is still to appoint a leader to manage the fund, after the earlier managing director 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% or $485.25 million of its $2.01 billion revenue in the July-September quarter. Demand from these new-age solutions increased 9.1% sequentially in the September quarter as against 2.1% overall dollar revenue growth posted by the company.
For this reason, the app testing platform offered by Headspin can be taken by Wipro to some of its current 1,274 clients. During the April-June period of the current financial year, Wipro claims that its investment in 10 start-ups helped the company build 80 customer engagements and win seven deals from its customers, underlining one way in which large IT companies are keeping pace with new technologies.
Last year, Headspin worked with the Reliance Jio app’s teams on a few projects at The GenNext Hub, the start-up accelerator backed by Microsoft Ventures and Reliance Industries Ltd.
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