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V Balakrishnan, former chief financial officer and board member of Infosys Technologies, has invested in CannyKart, a marketplace which only deals with the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, products and solutions. This is his first investment in e-commerce.
IoT refers to transfer of data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.
As part of this investment, the amount of which was not disclosed, Balakrishnan would join the advisory board of the six-month start-up, which aims to go live by July.
"With mobile penetration increasing and too many sensors/wearables coming in, you need a distinguished marketplace where all the IoT devices can be traded. There are no specialised marketplaces for IoT devices and that is what this company is trying to do," said Balakrishnan.
This is his fifth investment in a start-up, in his personal capacity, since he left Infosys in December 2013. He is also founder-chairman of Exfinity Fund, a venture capital fund which has his former colleague, T V Mohandas Pai, former Wipro joint chief executive officer Girish Paranjpe and former India CEO of I-flex Solutions, Deepak Ghaisas, as founding partners.
"I am primarily looking at the technology space, primarily companies in the areas of products and platforms. For example, Avekshaa Technologies, a company where I have invested, has a platform which does predictability and assurance testing for large corporations, while Clonect Solutions is creating an ERP for compliance. Similarly, Taxsutra is an online tax information portal," he added.
Balakrishnan has also invested in Virtual Power System (VPS), a US-based start-up where Vinod Dham, widely credited as inventor of the pentium chip, is a co-investor. VPS has also received funding from Exfinity Fund and provides technologies to reduce consumption of power by data centres.
"CannyKart is unique in the sense that they are also bringing in solutions providers, so that if anybody wants to integrate the solutions with IoT devices, that also they can get done," said Balakrishnan.
Founded in September 2014, CannyKart has so far been bootstrapped by its founders and their friends and families. In the pre-launch phase, the webpage is now seeing 15,000-20,000 visits every day. Apart from Balakrishnan, the company has got Mario Leone, a former investment chief of Ingram Micro, the world's largest wholesale technology product distributor, as an advisor.
"We have built a great platform and got a good number of suppliers on-boarded, including some of the big US distributors. We consistently see a daily hit of 15,000 to 20, 000 on to the portal and a monthly average of around 500,000," said Rangarajan Kotadi, CEO of CannyKart, who worked with information technology companies such as HCL, Unisys, HP and Synnext Corporation before starting this company. It is starting with IoT products and in subsequent phases, plans to rope in suppliers for solutions and devices, he added.
According to technology research and advisory firm Gartner, around 4.9 billion connected IoT devices are expected to be in use this year, an increase of 30 per cent over the previous year, and this is expected to reach 25 billion globally by 2020.
