Ratan Tata, chairman emeritus of Tata Sons, has invested an undisclosed amount in big data analytics start-up Infinite Analytics. Existing investor Nikhil Vora, founder of Sixth Sense Ventures also participated in this round.
Infinite helps customers like home-sharing firm AirBnB, ecommerce company eBay and Croma Retail mine hidden insights, patterns and unknown correlations from huge amount of data. It will use the funds to hire talent and scale up its operations in areas like retail and also explore new industries.
“It’s a dream come true to have Mr. Tata back us. We have grown up admiring and respecting Mr.Tata’s business acumen and this is a great opportunity for us to learn from him directly,” said Akash Bhatia, chief executive of Infinite. “His guidance (Mr. Tata) and vision will definitely help us grow Infinite into an analytics powerhouse.”
Mr. Bhatia co-founded Infinite three years ago along with his classmate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purushotham Botla. Mr. Bhatia and Mr. Botla converted a classroom project at MIT into a big data technology start-up after being mentored by the World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee. The start-up later received investment from Mr. Lee and Deb Roy, chief media scientist at Twitter.
“We look forward to working with him (Mr. Tata) to uncover promising areas where we can deploy our analytics product,” said Mr. Botla.
As the country witnesses an entrepreneurship boom, Mr. Tata is among a number of corporate leaders who are backing young companies. Mr. Tata, who steered India's biggest industrial group for two decades has invested in over a dozen young ventures in the last one year. Some of them include consumer internet companies like Ola, Snapdeal and Paytm and Chinese smartphone maker, Xiaomi.
