Phillips may invest in Indian healthcare technology startups; looks to join other global Fortune 500 companies

BENGALURU: Dutch consumer electronics and healthcare giant Philips is looking to join the ranks of other global Fortune 500 companies in leveraging India’s rapidly evolving startup ecosystem and is initiating moves to set up a venture fund that will look to invest in Indian healthcare technology startups, a top executive told ET.

In an interview, Philips veteran Jeroen Tas, who currently heads the company’s connected care and health informatics business, said that the plans to set up an India-focused venture fund were still at an early stage and would also depend on the success of similar funds that Philips has set up in Israel and Netherlands.


“We are also looking at setting up a venture fund — we already have venture funds in Israel, and we have already invested in a couple of small innovative companies. We have a venture fund in the Netherlands and we’ll definitely look at doing something here — It’ll entirely focus on healthcare technology setups,” said Tas, who cofounded IT services firm Mphasis. Earlier this week, private equity fund Blackstone bought HP’s 60% stake in Mphasis for up to $1.1billion.

Tas did not share specific details of the proposed new venture fund, but said it would be along similar lines of the fund the company set up in Israel. In July last year, Philips and Israel-based pharma company Teva jointly set up a $30-million venture fund to invest in medical devices and healthcare technology startups in Israel over eight years.

Tas, who also intends to park himself in the front rows of pitching sessions from Indian startups on his next visit to India, said that Bengaluru had become an important hub for the company, given the abundance of high-quality tech talent.

“We have a couple of hubs that are really important to us — clearly Bangalore is one, Eindhoven is one. We have a smaller hub in the US and Israel. And each of these are in places where we have an ecosystem,” said Tas.

In India, Philips is also looking to significantly ramp up its data-analytics team and hire hundreds of data scientists over the next 5 years. The company, currently, has about 200 data scientists working out of its Bengaluru technology centre.

“We will potentially have 2,000 people in Bangalore as part of the data science team — up from 200 now. The kind of talent we are looking for is people with a science background.

The best people who are really good at this have a statistical background. We’re also looking at people who have done business analytics — also people who have majored in physics, chemistry, etc. That kind of background,” said Tas.

“If you look at the growth that we-’ve had over the past 5 years, we’ve grown at 25% every year. We have close to 3,000 people over here at Philips Innovation Centre on our payroll. And we have more people on our payroll. What we are doing will be more intellectual property sensitive. And we see these as core skills,” he said.