Infosys invests $4M in another US-based startup, Waterline Data Science

Infosys, one of India’s largest IT service providers, today announced that it has made an investment of USD 4 million in Waterline Data Science, a provider of data discovery and data governance software.

Waterline Data Science founded by Alex Gorelik is headquartered in Mountain View, California and currently consists of a core team of five. In October 2014, the company had raised a series A round of $7 Million from Menlo Ventures and Sigma West.

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Waterline Data Science provides data scientists and business analysts with a self-service data catalog to help discover, understand and provision data, and an automated data inventory that enables agile data governance across metadata, data quality and data lineage. Alex, Founder and CEO of Waterline Data Science believes that the current funding and partnership will help enterprises scale self-service and data governance for smart data discovery. It will provide significant value to the customers as the company combine our service offering with Infosys’ global presence and broad industry expertise.

Infosys states that the investment will be completed on or before February 4, 2016. Talking about the investment and need for automated data discovery solutions, Ritika Suri, Senior VP of Corporate Development at Infosys said

We see a need for automated data discovery solutions like Waterline Data Science in helping our clients achieve greater business value from their Big Data assets. 

In 2015, Infosys had invested in a total of six startups out of which five were US based. In early 2015, Infosys had announced a USD 250 million ‘Innovate in India Fund’, to invest in promising Indian startups that could be inducted into the global ecosystem of strategic partners that Infosys has been building. ANSR Consulting, a Bengaluru-based Global In-house Center (GIC) strategy consulting and implementation firm, is the only Indian startup so far in the portfolio that Infosys has disclosed to the public under their Innovation Fund.

Recomended read from December 2015: Infosys makes its second startup investment in a week

The government of India recently launched a Startup Action Plan at their recently concluded 'Startup India' event, to make it easier for Indian entrepreneurs to setup and run their companies. So it will be interesting to see if these changes and the boost in the Indian startup ecosystem urge Infosys to invest and mentor more Indian startups this year.