Infosys has announced that the company has completed sale of its stake in Denmark-based startup UNSILO for $800,000, according to company’s regulatory filings. The IT major however, took a massive haircut on the valuation, with the company receiving less than half of its original $2 million investment in UNSILO. The software giant had invested in UNSILO in 2016 from its $500 million Infosys Innovation fund.
Exit from UNSILO marks yet another disappointing exit for the company. Prior to this, it exited ANSR Consulting Holdings Inc. for $1 million, lower than the $1.4 million that it had invested. Both these are the only two exits that the fund has had so far.
Cactus Communications, which is a global scientific communications company, acquired the Danish company. In the past, Cactus has developed proprietary tools and platforms aimed at the pharma and publishing ecosystem.
UNSILO, co-founded by Mads Rydahl and Thomas Laursen, is an artificial intelligence startup that is focused on advanced text analysis. The company uses a combination of machine-learning and natural language processing to analyze large quantities of text and improve the speed and effectiveness of knowledge workers across many industries.
Infosys innovation fund was set up in 2013 with an initial corpus of $100 million. In January 2015, the size of the fund was expanded to $500 million. It appears that the fund has invested in just nine startups so far and two venture capital firms — Vertex Ventures and Stellaris Venture Partners.
While the fund has not been very active in terms of making investments, it grabbed headlines in the year 2018 as it lost some of its key founding members after the resignation of former CEO Vishak Sikka. It operated without a head for almost 10 months before Deepak Padaki was named to lead this investment vehicle.
