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Cyanogen Raises $80 Million From Premji Invest, Twitter, and Others

Cyanogen Raises $80 Million From Premji Invest, Twitter, and Others

By Hitesh Arora | Updated: 24 March 2015 17:16 IST

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Cyanogen, the popular custom ROM maker, on Monday announced that the company has raised $80 million (approximately Rs. 497 crores) in Series C funding, which involved new investors such as Twitter, Qualcomm, Telefonica, Rupert Murdoch and more.

Announcing the news on its blog, Cyanogen noted that it has received a total of $110 million (approximately Rs. 684 crores) in overall funding till date. The Series C funding was led by India-based Premji Invest, which is owned by the well-known business personality Azim Premji, Chairman of Wipro.

"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 of Premji Invest. "Cyanogen is well positioned to become the 3rd leading mobile OS, and we're excited to back them in growing their business on a global scale."

The new strategic investors in this round of funding include Twitter Ventures, Qualcomm Inc., Telefonica Ventures, Smartfren Telecom, Index Ventures, Access Industries (the US-based industrial group headed by Len Blavatnik), Rupert Murdoch, Vivi Nevo, and several yet to be announced partners. Existing investors Benchmark, Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, and Tencent Holdings Ltd. also participated, said Cyanogen. Notably Microsoft is missing from the list, in-line with the latest report from March that contradicted one from January.

"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 Kirt McMaster, CEO of Cyanogen Inc. "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."

The company didn't disclose the valuation now, but according to Re/ code citing sources, Cyanogen is now valued at $700 million (approximately Rs. 4,353 crores).

Cyanogen is best known for its commercial distribution Cyanogen OS, and the open-source Android project CyanogenMod with its popular custom ROMs. In India, the company has partnered with Micromax to offer Cyanogen OS on the Yu Yureka smartphone. Previously, the operating system maker got recognition the world over for the OnePlus One smartphone, which shipped with Cyanogen OS. At one point of time, we had also heard of big names like Amazon and Microsoft looking to invest in Cynaogen, but that eventually didn't happen.

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