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India’s Premji and China’s Tencent back US mobile OS start-up

  • Holden Mann
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Premji Invest, the family office of Wipro Enterprises chairman Azim Premji, led an $80 million Series C round for US mobile operating system developer Cyanogen.

Other participants in the round included new investors Twitter Ventures, Qualcomm Incorporated, and Rupert Murdoch, along with existing investors Tencent and Andreessen Horowitz. Cyanogen declined to identify some of the new participants in its statement.

Cyanogen has raised $110 million to date, including the latest round. The company will use the funds to hire new staff and accelerate development on its mobile platform.

Cyanogen produces CyanogenMod, a modification of Google's Android mobile OS that offers users an alternative to their mobile device's default system. As CyanogenMod is open source, it can be adapted to a wide variety of devices and distributed for free. CyanogenMod is one of the most popular custom modifications of Android.

The company also produces a commercial version of its software, Cyanogen OS. This system is installed by default on selected devices. Cyanogen offers its commercial software to manufacturers as a way to sidestep Google's restrictions on Android.

Premji has become increasingly active in the US tech sector. Last September it participated in a $106 million Series E round for database software developer DataStax, and earlier this year it contributed to a $115 million Series C round for cloud billing firm Zuora, according to VC Circle.

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