Making yet another strategic investment in startups, TVS Motor Company Limited, through its wholly-owned subsidiary TVS Motor (Singapore) Pte Limited, has signed a definitive agreement with New York-based Scienaptic Systems Inc to invest $7 million in the latter’s series-A funding. The company, in a filing to the BSE, said that the closing of the investment is subject to obtaining necessary regulatory approvals.
Scienaptic Systems is a big data analytics startup which has designed a unique platform called Ether using its proprietary machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms. Solutions built on Ether, TVS Motor said, will help the company to improve risk and credit assessment and monitor evolving fraud patterns among other benefits.
Notably, TVS Motor’s Singapore-headquartered arm aims to leverage the benefits of digital technologies with a focus on the automotive and fintech industries. As a result, it is building capabilities around big data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), internet of things (IoT), machine learning (ML) and virtual reality (VR) with an intention to deploy these new-age tools to solve business challenges.
TVS Motor’s recent investments include $2.5 million in IoT firm Altizon, $3.85 million in ML developer TagBox and about₹11 crore in electric motorcycle startup named Ultraviolette Automotive Private Limited.
Rajesh Narasimhan, board member of TVS Motor Company and CEO of TVS Motor (Singapore), said, “Scienaptic’s end-to-end data analytics solution, with applicability to customers in various industries, has the potential to generate a new profit stream for our group. We are happy to invest in, and strategically partner with Scienaptic as they continue to pursue bottom-line impact for Fortune 100 companies. Our current investment in Scienaptic is part of the initial set of investments being made in strategically relevant digital startups.”
Commenting on raising funds from TVS Motor, Pankaj Kulshreshtha, founder & CEO, Scienaptic added, “The investment by TVS enables us to accelerate our sales and product development. We found a significant match in value systems between the two organizations and believe that our collective strengths will enable Scienaptic to grow exponentially and become a global leader in AI-powered decisioning space.”
Source: Mint