Infy co-founders Kris, Shibulal invest in SellerworX, Vigyanlabs

BENGALURU: Infosys co-founders Kris Gopalakrishnan and S D Shibulal, along with the company's former board member Srinath Batni, are scripting a startup story.

The trio are co-investing $1 million (Rs 6 crore) in Bengaluru-based e-commerce platform SellerworX Online Services and $2 million (Rs 12 crore) in Mysuru-based clean energy company Vigyanlabs.

These are the maiden investments through their newly-launched business incubator Axilor Ventures, said sources.Shibulal and Batni responded to an email from TOI saying they don't comment on their investments. Gopalakrishnan said, "I don't want to comment on these rumours. If I'm making an investment, it will be made public at an appropriate time."

Axilor Ventures intends to help earlystage startups in areas like e-commerce, healthcare, life sciences, sustainability and clean technology . Axilor has other co-founders including Tarun Khanna, professor at the Harvard Business School, and Ganapathy Venugopal, former head of strategy & planning at Infosys. Venugopal is the CEO of Axilor.

The incubator runs three programmes -accelerator, entrepreneur-in-residence and early-stage funding. For the selected startups, the Axilor founders will co-invest through their individual funds. The size of funding will range from Rs 30 lakh in the accelerator programme to Rs 6 crore for earlystage companies. The first batch of the accelerator programme is scheduled to commence in the first quarter of this year.

SellerworX was co-founded by Venkat Potluri, Ganesamurthy G and Chandramouli, all IIM alums who had built businesses and platforms at Amazon, Tesco and Flipkart. SellerworX's platform improves the retail supply chain in India. Potluri did not respond to TOI's queries on the funding. Vigyanlabs, which counts ANZ and HP as customers, aims to maximize power savings and reduce carbon emissions in PCs, laptops and servers. "Our flagship product reduces power consumption by 30%-40%.We have a patented algorithm that runs on the desktop or laptop in the background," said Srinivas Varadarajan, CEO of the company. He, however, declined to comment on the funding. Two years ago, Zoho cofounder Sridhar Vembu invested $100,000 in the company. Investor Shashidhar Pai is also said to be investing $1 million in Vigyanlabs.