SBI Holdings subsidiary invests $15 million in AntWorks

NEW DELHI: Japanese financial services giant SBI Holdings has invested $15 million (about Rs 103 crore) in AntWorks, the three year-old artificial intelligence startup founded by Asheesh Mehra and Govind Sandhu.

As part of the strategic partnership, SBI Holdings and Singapore-headquartered AntWorks have also formed a joint venture to tap opportunities in the AI space across Southeast Asia, according to a statement issued by Yoshitaka Kitao, president of SBI Holdings.

“AntWorks has risen through the ranks of global RPA, automation and artificial intelligence companies with a ferocity that’s unprecedented in the industry,” Kitao said. “We are excited with the possibilities of ANTstein, and look forward to their growth in the Asian region through our joint venture, as well as globally.”


Mehra, the CEO of AntWorks, said the company’s founders will continue to own majority stake in the three-year-old venture. The former Infosys senior executive, however, did not disclose any other financial details of the deal, which is believed to have closed in the last few days.

The investment in AntWorks was made through SBI Investment Co, a subsidiary of SBI Holdings.

SBI Holdings, earlier known as Softbank Investment Corporation, primarily operates through three segments—financial services, asset management and bio-technology-related businesses. The Tokyo-headquartered company, which counted the technology and telecom-focused strategic holdings company as a major stakeholder, bought back its shares from SoftBank in 2006, with the latter selling the rest of its stake to Goldman Sachs Japan.

This is the first round of institutional funding raised by the AntWorks. The venture is expected to use the proceeds from the round of funding to further build up its technology product portfolio, spend more on research a development, on marketing and sales, and expand into newer markets.

“With this investment, we will work together with SBI Group to bring end-to-end, AI-based Enterprise RPA to the globe in a way not done before,” said Sandhu, chief financial officer at AntWorks. “Our goal is to empower enterprises in emerging markets like Philippines, India, China, among others.” Sandhu has previously worked with Tata Consultancy Services, Capita and WNS.

AntWorks, founded in 2015 with seed capital of $8 million, is a business process outsourcing and technology startup operating in the healthcare and financial services space.

It provides analytics, consulting technology-as-a-service and business-process-as-a-service to clients, including medium and small institutions. In 2015, it had acquired US-based Benchmark Systems, a healthcare applications services provider, in an all-cash deal, estimated at about Rs 33 crore, and which was first reported by ET.

“The AntWorks differentiator is in bringing together all three pieces of the Automation puzzle, effortlessly and under one umbrella — Data Ingestion, RPA, and Artificial Intelligence,” Mehra said.