Google’s investment in Bharti Airtel is part of its big India push

New Delhi: Bharti Airtel on Friday announced that Google will invest up to $1 billion in the telecom major as part of its Google for India Digitization Fund. The deal includes Google investing $700 million to acquire 1.28% ownership in Airtel and up to $300 million towards potential multi-year commercial agreements.

The tech behemoth has in the last couple of years doubled down on its investments in Indian companies, focusing on content and commerce.

It has invested
$4.5 billion in Reliance Industries’ Jio Platforms and led an investment of
$145 million in InMobi’s Glance, which also owns a short-video platform, Roposo.

Here is a look at some of Google’s India investments

■ In December 2020, Google
invested in VerSe Innovation, the parent company of Indian content and news aggregator Dailyhunt. The round also saw participation from Microsoft, Falcon Edge’s Alpha Wave Incubation, among others

■ In January 2021, hyperlocal delivery startup Dunzo
raised $40 million from new and existing investors including Google, Lightbox, Evolence, among others.

■ In March 2021, it participated in
DotPe’s Series A funding round, where the offline-to-online commerce platform raised $27.5 million.

■ Indian artificial-intelligence (AI) based mental health app Wysa in March 2021
received an undisclosed amount of investment from the Google Assistant fund. It was the first investment by the fund in Asia.

■ In July 2021, Bengaluru-based Slang Labs
raised $500,000 from Google Assistant fund and others.

■ Neobanking startup Open in October 2021
raised $100 million in a funding round led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek, along with participation from Google, card operator Visa and Japan’s SBI Investment.

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