TPG's involvement in Fractal includes a mix of primary investment and a secondary share purchase from funds advised by buyout firm and existing investor Apax Partners. The share purchase deal will close by the first quarter of this year, following which Apax will continue to remain a major shareholder of the startup. Co-founded by Srikanth Velamakanni and Pranay Agrawal in Mumbai in 2000, New York-headquartered Fractal provides artificial intelligence and analytics solutions to Fortune 500 companies. "We continue to see great momentum in how clients are leveraging AI to accelerate digital transformation," Velamakanni said in a statement. The company's products include Qure.ai that helps radiologists make diagnostic decisions, and Theremin.ai,

Fractal has raised $360 million from TPG in a new financing round and entered the unicorn club as the Mumbai and San Francisco-headquartered AI startup, which counts Google and Wells Fargo among its customers, scales its offerings and begins preparation for an IPO. The new financing round valued the 21-year-old startup "at well north of $1 billion," said Srikanth Velamakanni, co-founder and group chief executive at Fractal, in an interview with TechCrunch. TPG invested in the startup through its TPG Capital Asia, its Asia-focused private equity platform. The new round, which brings the startup's all-time raise to about $685 million, involves some secondary share purchase as well. Fractal Analytics provides artificial intelligence and analytics solutions to scores of Fortune 100 firms.

Jan 5 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence technology startup Fractal said on Wednesday it has received a $360 million investment from private equity firm TPG through its Asia focused investment platform. TPG's involvement in Fractal includes a mix of primary investment and a secondary share purchase from funds advised by buyout firm and existing investor Apax Partners. The share purchase deal will close by the first quarter of this year, following which Apax will continue to remain a major shareholder of the startup. Co-founded by Srikanth Velamakanni and Pranay Agrawal in Mumbai in 2000, New York-headquartered Fractal provides artificial intelligence and analytics solutions to Fortune 500 companies. "We continue to see great momentum in how clients are leveraging AI to accelerate digital transformation," Velamakanni said in a statement.

Industry executives believe automation went mainstream this year and it has received the right amount of attention at the C-suite level. Also read: India can't make up its mind on PSUs, 30 years after liberalisation For California-based robotic process automation (RPA) company Automation Anywhere, growth in its India market this year has been mainly driven by existing customers migrating to the cloud and those that have completely revisited their operating model due to the pandemic. "Cloud lowers the cost of ownership and it prepares them for a significant scale up when the economy recovers next year. In fact, many of the new logos we have signed up in last 12 months have straightaway started on the cloud," said Milan Sheth, executive vice president-IMEA, Automation Anywhere. While growth this year has been driven by the services sector in the banking space, financial services & insurance (BFSI), utilities and hospital management, next year it will be led by the manufacturing sector.

In the past four years, about 90% of enterprises have experienced a turn that upset normal operations, and organisations with a higher adoption rate of contemporary technologies including artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) will have a competitive advantage, a Gartner report has said. Despite analytics including AI being part of "discretionary spend", there has been an increase in demand for such solutions during the current downturn. "This was not the case during the recession of 2008-09," said Srikanth Velamakanni, co-founder and group chief executive, Fractal Analytics. "AI is still discretionary but most of our clients in the last three months have come up to us and said that though it is discretionary, it is mission critical. It is super important to us and we are actually going to expand," said Velamakanni.

Srikanth Velamakanni – the Co-Founder and Group Chief Executive of artificial intelligence (AI) company, Fractal Analytics – tells Ouida Taaffe about the limitations of AI, the importance of data, and how financial services can make the most of both. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a bit like teenage sex – everybody is talking about it, but not many firms are really doing it. And one of the reasons for this is that AI itself is often not well defined. People can start out with a data objective and expect AI to fill the gap. AI, however, can only answer very specific questions.