Mukesh Dhirubhai Ambani, Asia’s richest man, was born on 19 April 1957. He is the richest man in India and Director of Reliance Industries Limited which is the highest valuable company by market value in India. He is an innovator and a man of extraordinary vision.

In this article, we are going to talk about some of the start-ups that are funded by Reliance Industries Limited. The success of Reliance Industries Limited is an inspiration to all young entrepreneurs. RIL has also created a venture named GenNext Ventures, which looks up to acquire a 15% stake in young start-ups.

Reliance industries limited has made an investment in a number of start-ups by either acquiring the start-ups or merging them with its subsidiaries.

So let’s know about some of the startups funded by Reliance Industries:

Tesseract

Tesseract was founded in the year of 2016 by Kshitij Marwah. This Mumbai-based VR start-up has launched two software and three hardware products in mixed reality augmented reality and virtual reality spaces. In the year 2019, 92.7% stake of startup was acquired by Reliance Industries while announcing its augmented reality platform Holoboard in partnership with Tesseract.

Reverie Language Technologies

Reverie Language Technologies provides a cloud-based translation management product suite. Reverie Language Technologies was founded in the year 2009. The founder and CEO of the company is Arvind Pani. Reliance industries limited acquired Reverie Language Technologies with a majority stake for Rs 190 crore and will invest Rs77 Crore by March 2021. Reliance will have 83.3% of equity capital on a fully diluted basis with a total investment of Rs. 267 crores.

Haptik

Haptik is a conversational AI platform that allows its customers to chat with their voice assistants to complete daily tasks such as travel bookings, online shopping, food delivery, etc. Haptik was founded in the year 2013. The founders of the enterprise are Aakrit Vaish and Swapan Rajdev. Haptik is considered one of the largest AI platforms in the world. In the year 2019, Haptik startup was acquired by Reliance Industries limited for Rs700 crore.

Grab a Grub Services Pvt. Ltd

Grab a Grub Services Pvt. Ltd was founded in the year 2013.  This start-up was founded by Jignesh Patel, Pratish Sanghvi, and Nishant Vora. It is also regarded as India’s first startup to offer tech-abled delivery solutions to businesses. McDonald’s, Big Basket, Myntra, Amazon Now, Swiggy are some of the main clients of Grab. Grab offers services like on-demand, reverse deliveries, first mile, and last-mile logistics. In the year 2019, 83% of Equity shares of start-ups were acquired by Reliance Industrial Investments and Holdings Ltd by striking a deal worth $14.9 million.

Fynd

Fynd is a Fashion eCommerce Platform founded in the year 2012 as Shopsense Retail Technology private limited. Fynd was founded by Farooq Adam, Harsh Shah, and Sreeraman MG. Fynd functions via an O2O model (offline-to-online Model). In the year 2019, the majority of the stake of this startup was acquired by Reliance Industries limited for Rs295.25 Crores.

Embibe

Embibe is an education platform that provides personal learning outcomes to students by using data analytics. This education platform was founded by Aditi Avasthi. The ed-tech start-up mainly targets students across k-12, higher education, vernacular languages, professional skills, and all curriculum categories across India and abroad. In the year 2018, Reliance Industries limited invested a huge amount of $180 million in this start-up. With this investment, reliance acquired 72.69 % of this ed-tech start-up.

Hamleys

Hamleys is the largest and oldest toy retailer in the world. Hamleys was founded in the year 1760 by William Hamley. In the year 2019, Reliance Industries limited strike a deal with this British multinational retailer worth Rs 620 crores. With this, Reliance Industries got all the stakes of this multinational retailer.

Saavn

On March 23, 2018, Reliance Industries Limited announced the merger of its digital music service JioMusic having an implied value of $670 million with Saavn at $330 million. The saavn was founded in the year 2007. With this deal, the Reliance industries limited acquired approximately 80% share in the merged entity pegged at over $1 Billion. With this strategic merger, Saavn was rebranded as JioSaavn.

Netmeds

Netmeds is one of the largest medical start-ups in India. Pradeep Dadha founded this health tech start-up in the year 2010. Last year in 2020, in the month of August, Reliance Industries limited made an investment of about 62 crores in this health tech start-up. This investment helped Reliance industries to get the majority stake in Netmeds.

C square

C square is a Bangalore-based software company that provides software solutions for various industries primarily focused on Pharma Sector. In the year 2019, Reliance Industrial Investments and Holdings Limited (RIIHL), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), acquired the stake of C-square with an investment of about INR 22 crore. RIIHL will further invest an amount of up to INR 60 Cr. With this investment, Reliance Industries acquired the majority of the stake i.e. 82% equity capital of this software company on a fully diluted basis.

Also Read: List of startups funded by Mahindra Group

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