Kinvey, a US-based start-up providing mobile development platforms, plans to set up a research and development centre in Chennai to focus on data security, artificial intelligence, virtual reality and machine-learning.

The centre is expected to come up by next year, said Sravish Sridhar, founder and CEO of Kinvey, which provides a complete platform for backend services that powers businesses and mission-critical apps.

Clients use Kinvey as the central digital infrastructure platform to build and deliver mission-critical B2C, B2B and B2E digital app experiences, across their lines of business.

The firm also has a number of SMBs/start-ups as clients that run their entire digital business on its platform. It has over 31,000 apps on Kinvey, built by over 1,00,000 developers all over the world, said Sridhar.

The five-year-old Boston-based company has 45 employees in the US and seven in India (Chennai and Pune). With the Chennai R&D centre, the employee strength in India will increase by 25-30 next year, he said.

System integrators like Infosys, VirtusaPolaris, HCL and Cognizant use Kinvey’s platform to build solutions, said Sridhar. “We want to expand the number of partners to nearly 100 next year, from the current 30.”

So far, the company has raised a total of $17.8 million from Atlas Venture, Avalon Ventures, Verizon Ventures and NTT Docomo.

Investment in the Chennai centre has not yet been decided, Sridhar said.

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