Reliance’s GenNext ventures backs surveillance solution company Videonetics

MUMBAI: GenNext Ventures, corporate venture arm of Reliance Industries, is backing video surveillance technology maker Videonetics Technologies, marking the second investment for the fund.

Kolkata-based Videonetics founded by Tinku Acharya, who developed the webcam application for Intel, develops a range of video management and analytic software and has filed over 20 patents.

This is the first round of institutional funding for the six-year old company that counts the Airports Authority of India, Mushriff Mall & Capital Plaza Mall in Abu Dhabi and Kuwait’s Information and Communication Ministry as customers.

“Government agencies should realise that Indian technologies are available which are much more robust and work well in the local environment,” said Acharya who expects his company to earn revenue of about Rs 20 crore in the current fiscal year.

The 51-year old entrepreneur, who spent over two decades in the US working at companies like Intel and AT&T Labs, said Videonetics technology can be used across multiple platforms unlike its international competitors such as Milestone Systems and AgentVi.

The product, which took three years to develop, can be used for video surveillance, automated number plate recognition, red-light violation detection and facial recognition.

While its primary application is in the field of surveillance, the product also has application in segments like retail and healthcare. “In today’s world, video is the new data,” said John Kuruvilla, managing director of GenNext, the fund recently closed an investment in enterprise software maker Covacsis Technologies “By 2017, two-thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video.

Visual computing solutions that build upon this data as the core can disrupt existing practices,” said Kuruvilla. Industry think tank iSpirt estimates that India can build a $100 billion (Rs 6 lakh crore) software product industry by 2025.