ChrysCapital invests $63M in US-headquartered IT firm Infogain

By Bhawna Gupta

  • 11 Aug 2015
VCCircle_Infogain | Credit: ChrysCapital Investment Advisors India Pvt. Ltd. provides early stage, expansion, growth and buyout capital to listed and unlisted companies operating in India.

Private equity firm ChrysCapital has invested $63 million (Rs 400 crore) to pick an undisclosed stake in California-headquartered IT consulting and application hosting solutions provider Infogain Corporation, according to a press release.

Founded by an executive of Indian origin, Infogain also has substantial operations in the country. The funding will help it increase its offerings, pursue strategic acquisitions, explore new geographies and hire more staff.

"ChrysCapital's support will help our firm to grow organically and through strategic acquisitions. Additionally, we will leverage opportunities to diversify into next generation service offerings such as customer experience, cloud services and end-to-end retail solutions," said Kapil Nanda, CEO of Infogain.

Founded by Nanda in 1990, Infogain provides front-end, customer-facing technologies, processes and applications. It has a customer portfolio in the US, Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific and India.

The company specialises in offering solutions for the high-tech, retail and insurance verticals in the areas of software product engineering, service automation and mobility.

In the last five years, Infogain has more than doubled its revenues. It employs around 2,000 people.

In 2008, Infogain had acquired Mumbai-based Spider Systems Pvt Ltd.

“Infogain has demonstrated industry-leading growth rates, while building significant differentiation in the software product engineering and new-age, digital service lines. The company, with its strong leadership, talented employees, and outstanding customer base, is an ideal platform to build scale through a combination of organic growth and strategic acquisitions," said Sanjay Kukreja, managing director at ChrysCapital.

This is one of the single-largest negotiated investment deals for the PE firm in almost a decade, according to VCCEdge, the data research platform of VCCircle.

It had invested more in dollar terms in Intas Pharma but in tranches and had also bet much higher sums in public listed IT firms Infosys and HCL Technologies through direct stock market purchases of shares in the past.

Its last big-ticket negotiated deal of a higher size at one-go involved its pre-IPO investment in Idea Cellular in 2006.

The PE firm, which has an active public market investment practice, had last year also sealed a separate deal in the IT sector. It led a Series B funding round worth $53 million in Pennsylvania-headquartered LiquidHub. This was largely a secondary round where NewSpring Capital exited its seven-year-old investment. ChrysCapital had co-invested with a US-based family office.

Although primarily focused on India with its sector-agnostic private equity funds, ChrysCap has earlier made a few cross-border investments but none as large as the latest investment in Infogain.