Premji Invest, the family office of Wipro's billionaire chairmanAzim Premji, has led an $80-million round of funding in US-based mobile operating system startup Cyanogen, whose founder claims his objective is to create a Google-less Android and "put a bullet through Google's head."
Other investors include Twitter Ventures, Qualcomm, Telefonica Ventures, Smartfren Telecom, Index Ventures, and Rupert Murdoch. Existing investors Benchmark, Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, and Tencent Holdings also participated in the latest round, according to Times of India.
Till date, Cyanogen has received a total of $110 million in funding. Cyanogen was founded by Kirt McMaster, Steve Kondik and Koushik Dutta in 2009. The Cyanogen operating system is built on Android and is known for its personalization features, intuitive interface, speed, improved battery life and enhanced security.
"We're committed to creating an open computing platform that fundamentally empowers the entire mobile ecosystem from developers to hardware makers, and most importantly, consumers around the world," said CEO McMaster. "We're excited to have the backing of an amazingly diverse group of strategic investors who are supporting us in building a truly open Android," he added said the TOI report.
AndroidAuthority.com, which recently spoke to Blu — a Miami-based hardware manufacturer that is said to be building the first phone running the Google-less Cyanogen OS - said that the new Cyanogen phone would likely use the Amazon Appstore, the Opera web browser, Dropbox and Microsoft's OneDrive for cloud storage, Nokia Here for maps and Spotify for music consumption. It will also feature Bing for web searches and Microsoft's Cortana for a voice assistant. "When these other apps are deeply integrated into the phone, most of the time they perform better than the Google apps," AndroidAuthority quoted Blu CEO Samuel Ohev-Zion as saying.
CyanogenMod, the open source OS backed by the firm, has over 50 million users in 190 countries. "We invested in Cyanogen because we're big proponents of what they're doing in opening up Android and supporting global and local ecosystem players," said Sandesh Patnam, technology sector lead in Premji Invest.
