India's True North commits $75m to iLink Digital
True North has agreed to pay USD 75m for a minority stake in iLink Digital, a digital transformation service provider founded in the US by two Indian entrepreneurs.
The investment – True North’s third in the technology services space from its sixth fund, which closed on USD 560m in 2019 – will be structured in increments to be paid over the course of 12 months.
Founded in 2002 by Seattle-based Sree Balaji and Sridhar Mahadevan, iLink has 2,500 consulting and digital engineering professionals working out of 18 offices across eight countries. There are three offices in India, which account for much of the back-end operations. It has worked with more than 250 companies, including the likes of Microsoft, AT&T, and Siemens.
The company offers solutions spanning product engineering, data engineering and analytics, cloud operations and services, business applications consulting, and robotic process automation (RPA) consulting. Some of these services are delivered through a network of subsidiaries, such as Innowise for RPA, Red Sky for channel management, and Dazeworks for Salesforce implementation.
ILink also works with various enterprise technology providers as a designated solutions partner, including Microsoft, Salesforce, AWS, UiPath, Outsystems, Databricks, and Confluent.
True North’s investment will go towards enhancing iLink’s domain and technology expertise as well as initiatives aimed at improving engagement with employees and clients, according to a statement.
“ILink Digital perfectly reflects our fundamental approach to investing in digital product engineering companies. We want to invest in fast-growing, highly differentiated, innovation-led, globally present and platform-focused digital engineering companies,” said Prasad Thrikutam, a partner at True North.
“We believe that the 2020s will breed a new set of challengers and future leaders in the IT tech services landscape; ones who will challenge scale with speed, and incumbency with innovation.”
The US-India technology services corridor has provided some rich pickings for Indian private equity firms, especially on the buyout side. ChrysCapital and Everstone Group have both secured attractive exits from the likes Infogain and Everise, respectively, while other managers like Kedaara Capital are also targeting the space.
True North's other investments along this theme include Accion Labs, a provider of digital transformation services based in the US and India. The private equity firm committed USD 93m last year, facilitating a partial exit for TA Associates.
Lincoln International served as a financial advisor to iLink on the True North investment.
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