Cisco Investments, the venture capital arm of networking major Cisco, has invested in two early-stage Indian start-ups under its India Innovation theme.

The investments will be forked out from the $40 million allocation to the India Innovation theme, announced last June.

As a part of this, Cisco has already invested in four Indian start-ups — Covacsis, Mobstac, Ineda and MobiKwik. All the start-ups that Cisco invests in, are building disruptive solutions that align with Cisco’s business, including cloud, data centre, switching and routing.

“We have made six investments in early-stage Indian start-ups over the last 18 months and have enough money left from the $40 million India Innovation Theme to make more investments in promising start-ups until December 2016,” Joydeep Bose, Managing Director, Cisco Investments - Asia Pacific Japan (APJ), told BusinessLine . Cisco Investments has invested in 25 Indian start-ups, some of which are registered abroad, over the last 10 years.

Declining to mention the name of the two start-ups or the specific investment amounts made, Bose said: “The start-ups will be announcing our investments in their respective companies starting next week. We do not want to steal their thunder. We typically make investments ranging from $800,000 to $15 million in each start-up. One of the start-ups is an IoT (Internet of Things) systems integration player, while the other is in video analytics.”

For every investment it makes, Cisco acquires an 18-20 per cent stake in the start-ups. Besides contributing capital to early-stage companies, Cisco Investments helps accelerate the development of these companies by connecting them to expertise and resources such as Cisco IT, business leaders, VCs, and network of partners and customers through major industry events, such as Cisco Live.

The $40-million allocation to fund early-stage start-ups under the India Innovation theme is a part of the $250 million that was announced in early 2014, focusing on next generation technologies globally such as Big Data & Analytics, Internet of Things, Connected Mobility, Storage, Silicon and Content Technology Ecosystem.

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