Capillary makes second US acquisition; Speciale raises new growth fund; Infosys wins LexisNexis order
Capillary Technologies, one of India’s first-generation software-as-a-service companies, earlier this week, announced its second US acquisition as part of a strategy to step up its operations in the world’s biggest technology market. Speciale Invest, a Chennai VC firm known for backing deep-tech startups, has raised a fund aimed at series A or higher. And Infosys wins a contract that extends its 15-year relationship with LexisNexis. Also in this brief, Google reveals an AI supercomputer that it says is faster than competing systems from Nvidia, CNBC reports. Notes: Google, yesterday, published details about one of its artificial intelligence supercomputers, saying it is faster and more efficient than competing systems from Nvidia, the chipmaker known for its AI processors, CNBC reports. While Nvidia dominates the market for AI model training and deployment, with over 90 percent market share, Google has been designing and deploying AI chips called Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, since 2016, according to CNBC. AI models and products such as Google’s Bard or OpenAI’s ChatGPT — powered by Nvidia’s A100 chips — require a lot of computers and thousands of processors to work together to train models, with the computers running non-stop for weeks or months, CNBC explains. Google said that it had built a system with over 4,000 TPUs joined with custom components designed to run and train AI models. This supercomputer, called TPU v4, is “1.2x–1.7x faster and uses 1.3x–1.9x less power than the Nvidia A100,” Google’s researchers wrote. Infosys, yesterday, announced that it has won a new order, extending its collaboration with LexisNexis, a data and analytics company, to provide information services across its range of content, enterprise, and product applications. Infosys will provide IT services in multiple business domains that include LexisNexis’s global content systems, global business systems and product development. Infosys will provide application maintenance and support, application development and validation, life cycle upgrades, application modernization, and content modernization. Infosys will also provide strategic consultancy for LexisNexis’ downstream, discretionary investments. The Bengaluru-based IT giant didn’t provide any financial details. Infosys will report its fiscal fourth-quarter and annual earnings results on April 13. Capillary Technologies, one of India’s first-generation software-as-a-service companies, earlier this week, announced its second US acquisition as part of a strategy to step up its operations in the world’s biggest technology market. Bengaluru-based Capillary, which provides a customer loyalty and engagement SaaS platform, has acquired Texas-based Brierley+Partners, which offers software solutions in loyalty, strategy, and execution to retailers. Capillary Technologies has grown 3.5x times in the US since the acquisition of Persuade in 2021, and this acquisition consolidates its position as a platform of choice for loyalty technologies, the company said in a press release. In more startup news, Speciale Invest, a venture capital firm focused on early-stage investments in deep science and enterprise technologies, yesterday, announced the launch of a new fund aimed at growth-stage ventures, the Speciale Invest Growth Fund I. The new fund has an initial investment of Rs. 100 crore and has received approval from SEBI to fund startups at series A and above, according to a press release.