Wipro Ventures, the $100m strategic investment unit of India-based, New York-listed technology firm Wipro focuses on investing in early- to mid-stage startups.
Under chief strategy officer Rishad Premji, Wipro Ventures’ co-heads Biplab Adhya, top picture, and Venu Pemmaraju leverage the parent company’s “global reach and market knowledge to accelerate the growth of our portfolio companies,” Altizon, Avaamo, Emailage, Intsights, Talena, Vectra Networks, Vicarious, which cover the sweep across internet of things, chatbots, cybersecurity, big data and artificial intelligence.
Pemmaraju previously spent nearly 15 years as an investment director at Intel Capital, where nearly half of his 18 public deals have successfully exited, including CloudMade, a US-based platform for location-enabled apps and services, which was 50% acquired by France-based car parts maker Valeo, and CrowdStar, a social and mobile gaming company acquired by Glu Mobile.
Adhya was previously the global head of the Oracle practice at Wipro, where he was the responsible for strategy, sales and operations for the IT Services offerings around Oracle applications from early 2012.