Telecom major Bharti Airtel on Monday announced that it is acquiring around 25 per cent equity in Bengaluru-based technology start-up Lavelle Networks. The financial details of the deal, however, has not been revealed.
The development comes days after the telecom giant received USD 1 billion investment boost from Google. Founded in in 2015, Lavelle Networks specialises in Software-defined wide area network solutions and it serves a range of industry segments. The platform connects several thousands of Indian enterprises from the nation’s largest financial institutions to e-commerce networks, Airtel said in a filing. The agreement is subject to applicable statutory approvals.
On Monday, Airtel shares were up nearly 2% at ₹729.25 in noon deals on NSE.
“We are pleased to support Lavelle’s growth journey and excited to collaborate with them to take their world-class solutions to enterprise customers in the fast growing Indian NaaS market. With our end-to-end solutions play and brand trust, we are uniquely positioned to serve the needs of India’s fast growing digital economy,” said Ajay Chitkara, Director and CEO of Airtel Business.
Airtel Business’ Network as a service (NaaS) is a digital platform, which is built to address the emerging connectivity requirements of enterprises as they go through the cloud and digital adoption and acceleration journey.
As part of its NaaS portfolio, Airtel will offer software defined connectivity solution from Lavelle Networks and co-create a host of innovations as part of its NaaS platform. Through this deal, Lavelle aims to utilise its enterprise data network as Digital India is racing away to applications, cloud and software.
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“Digital India’s businesses are racing away to applications, cloud and software. Connecting all of this together are our enterprise data networks. We are extremely excited that our product and early market success will now be massively accelerated by this transformational partnership with Airtel,” Lavelle Networks CEO and co-founder Shyamal Kumar said.
