Star India Private Limited has invested a reported $10 million in Sagacito Technologies Pvt Ltd, a software as a service (SaaS) company offering big data analytics from its machine learning platforms, reports Mint. Sagacito shared the Mint report on its LinkedIn profile. The New Delhi headquartered company plans to use the funds for hiring, product development and geographical expansion.
Sagacito does not currently have a website, but it does have job openings for data scientists, tech architect and tech developers as seen here, here, here and here. According to the job descriptions, Sagacito will cover areas of (across industries) pricing and revenue management such as dynamic pricing, pricing intelligence, deal optimisation, recommendation engines for cross and upselling, revenue forecast etc., by ways of algorithms.
According to Sagacito co-founder Arunabh Das Sharma’s profile, the company was founded last month. On its LinkedIn profile, Sagacito said that it now has a “multimillion dollar contract for its services” with Star post the investment. Star India has a minority investment in the month old startup, according to the Mint report. When contacted, Star India refused to comment on the development.
Sagacito was founded by former Bennett, Coleman and Company Limited (BCCL) employees Ravi Dhariwal (CEO of publishing at BCCL) and Arunabh Das Sharma (president at BCCL), Yogesh Sharma (general manager of strategy and pricing at BCCL) and Ankit Garg who comes from AT Kearney.
Where will Star use big data applications?
It is not clear as to how Star is going to benefit from this investment, unless it has plans to foray into an ecommerce arm or use big data analytics for its video streaming platform Hotstar. Note that in November, Hotstar was made available in the US, UK, Canada, South Africa, Germany, Malaysia and Singapore among others. Star India declined to comment on this investment when contacted.
Star India management changes and spin offs
Note that Star India is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox. In April, it underwent a top management reshuffle, creating 5 business units and appointing their CEOs:
– Digital under which is Hotstar (Ajit Mohan)
– Entertainment which includes drama and movie channels nationally (Amit Chopra)
– Sports which includes Star Sports (Nitin Kukreja)
– Fox Star Studios for Bollywood and regional film distribution (Vijay Singh) and
– Star South for the company’s business interests in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana (Kevin Vaz)
Also read: Star India appoints Varun Narang to head Hotstar’s product and tech division
