Infosys to add four tier-2 hubs; Sequoia raises $2.85 bln for India and SEA; Spotify buys Top Gun voice AI company Sonantic

Infosys is setting up four more delivery centres in India’s tier-2 cities to allow staff to work closer to their hometowns, and tap a wider talent base, Economic Times reports, citing Krishnamurthy Shankar, the IT services company’s head of human resources. Sequoia raises its largest India fund yet. And Spotify adds a voice AI team and tech via an acquisition. Notes: Infosys is setting up four more delivery centres in India’s tier-2 cities to allow staff to work closer to their hometowns, and tap a wider talent base, Economic Times reports, citing Krishnamurthy Shankar, the IT services company’s head of human resources. These centres will be 1000-seaters and will be ready by the end of the next fiscal quarter, Shankar told ET. The company, which has nearly 40 percent of its staff as women, is particularly focusing on getting women to come back, Shankar told ET, after many left during the Covid-19 pandemic. Sequoia India and Sequoia Southeast Asia have collectively raised $2.85 billion across a set of funds, including India venture and growth funds and an $850 million Southeast Asian fund — Sequoia’s first dedicated fund for the region, the venture capital firm said in a blog post. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Sequoia as a global firm, 16 years in India, and 10 in Southeast Asia. The region’s startup ecosystem has grown rapidly in the last decade, thanks to the acceleration of digital adoption and rising consumer incomes. Last year, India emerged as the third-largest startup ecosystem in the world, after the US and China. Southeast Asia, meanwhile, is on track to becoming a $1 trillion digital economy by 2030, the VC firm notes in its blog post. Spotify is acquiring Sonantic, the UK-based voice AI company behind the tech that simulated actor Val Kilmer’s voice in the Hollywood blockbuster Top Gun Maverick, TechCrunch reports. “We’re really excited about the potential to bring Sonantic’s AI voice technology onto the Spotify platform and create new experiences for our users,” Ziad Sultan, Spotify’s Vice President of Personalisation, said in a blogpost. “This integration will enable us to engage users in a new and even more personalised way,” Ziad added. At Spotify, we’ve identified several potential opportunities for text-to-speech capabilities across our platform, and we believe that over the long term, high-quality voice will be important to growing our share of listening. For example, this voice technology could allow us to give context to users about upcoming recommendations when they aren’t looking at their screens, the company said in the blog post. And here’s the Val Kilmer connection. In real life, the actor is unable to speak as he did in the past as a result of throat cancer. Therefore, for the Top Gun sequel, in which he reprised his role as a foil (and now friend) to Tom Cruise, his condition, and the simulated voice Sonantic created, were both written into the plot of the film, TechCrunch explains. Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds: https://soundcloud.com/freemusicandsounds