Premji Invest, Azim Premji's family office, participates in $106 million pre-IPO funding led by KPCB

BANGALORE: Premji Invest, the family office of Wipro’s billionaire Chairman Azim Premji, has made its first bet in a Silicon Valley-based company after it started scouting for investments in the Bay Area a few months ago.

The family office has participated in a $106-million (Rs 640-crore) pre-IPO round — led by Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers (KPCB) — in DataStax, a database technology company. ET had reported on June 3 that the family office with a corpus of over Rs 10,000 crore is looking to invest in overseas opportunities as well.

Prakash Parthasarathy, chief investment officer of Premji Invest, confirmed the funding but declined to reveal details.

DataStax, founded in 2010, has raised a total of $190 million (Rs 1,150 crore) so far. ClearBridge Investments, Cross Creek Advisors and Wasatch Funds, which together manage over $100 billion (Rs 6 lakh crore) worth of mutual funds, and Comcast Ventures were also part of the Series E round.


The company has over 350 employees and is valued at $830 million with many Fortune 100 customers. It competes with database technology providers such as MongoDB and CouchDB.

“Demand for DataStax is strong and accelerating as companies are realising that in today’s world you either make data the centre of your business or fall far behind your competitors who do so,” said Billy Bosworth, CEO of DataStax.

Others too Looking to Invest

With the explosion of data, the market for database management systems is expected to grow rapidly. According to Gartner, the total spending on Distributed Database Management Systems (DBMSs) is expected to grow to over $50 billion, up from $31 billion in 2013.

Premji Invest had hired Sandesh Patnam, a San Francisco-based investor, for its technology practice. It has invested in over 60 companies, fixed-income instruments, real estate and shares.

“For Indian companies such as Infosys or InMobi, it is common to make strategic investments in overseas companies,” said Sanat Rao, mergers & acquisitions advisor at software products think tank iSpirt.

However, for those looking at ‘startup investing’ as an asset class, the common route has been to become a limited partner in an overseas fund. “We usually don’t see them go out and make an investment themselves,” said Rao.

Other family offices have been looking at overseas markets as well. Innovations Investment Management India, the family office of former Infosys CEO SD Shibulal, has bought nearly 700 real estate assets in Seattle, US. Meanwhile, Premji’s son Rishad Premji has been pushing Wipro’s investments in startups and product companies overseas. Under Rishad, Wipro has set up a $100-million (Rs 600-crore) fund to invest in technology startups.