Ratan Tata bets big on smartphones, invests in Xiaomi

Xiaomi has been making the right noises in India off lately and now the company has announced that Rata Tata Chairman emeritus of Tata Sons, has made an investment in the company. This news was shared by Hugo Barra (who is the Vice President of Xiaomi) on his Twitter account. This is the first investment by an Indian in this company.

We're really excited to announce our newest Xiaomi investor — Mr Ratan Tata, Chairman Emeritus of Tata Sons.

— Hugo Barra (@hbarra) April 26, 2015

As of now, the company has not disclosed the amount of the funding or the percentage stake that Ratan Tata would have in the company.
As per various reports, the Chinese company Xiaomi has had six rounds of funding till date and comprises of investors such as DST Global, GIC, Morningside Group, HOPU Investment Management company, QiMing venture Partners and Qualcomm Ventures. The last funding that the company had received was in December 2014, in which it had raised over $1 billion from investors including GIC valuing the company at over $45 billion.

This investment from Ratan Tata comes at an interesting time, as only a month ago, Azim Premji had invested $80-million in Cyanogen. Cyanogen is an operating system and currently Micromax is offering smartphones based on Cyanogen under its Yu brand.

Coming back to Xiaomi, the company had recently held a global launch event in New Delhi and in the same it had revealed the Xiaomi Mi 4i smartphones. As per the company, this is the first made for India smartphone by them. It would be interesting to see with Ratan Tata on-board will the company have more India-focus devices in the coming days.