It’s rare to have a founding team get an exit, but there’s a founding team in India that’s taken a company public, raised $142 million for a different startup, and now has seen a third startup be acquired by a global tech giant.
IBM has acquired Bengaluru-based SaaS company Prescinto. Prescinto was co-founded by Puneet Jaggi, who is also the co-founder of listed company Gensol, and was a co-founder of BluSmart cabs. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“Today, IBM is announcing it has acquired Prescinto, a leading provider of asset performance management (APM) software-as-a-service (SaaS) for renewables. Prescinto’s capabilities leverage AI to enable advanced monitoring, analytics, and automation to streamline renewable energy operations and manage clean energy and storage assets,” IBM said in a statement.
Prescinto was founded in 2016 by Puneet Jaggi and Sanjay Bhasin. It created software that provided analytics data for clean energy plants, including solar and wind energy generation plants. Prescinto collected data from these clean energy plants, and then gave the companies running the plants insights on how to improve their plants’ performance and productivity. The software also helped manage to these plants by using its data.
The company had made rapid progress. It now has 16 GW of clean energy assets that are managed using its platform, and it has clients in more than 14 countries. Prescinto counts companies like CleanMax, Azure Power and Radiance Renewables as its clients. It is headquartered in Ahmedabad, and has offices in Bengaluru, Pune, and New York City. The company had raised around Rs. 130 crore from investors including Lets Venture, Google for Startups Accelerator, Mumbai Angels and Jaggi’s other company, Gensol.
Prescinto has now been acquired by IBM. This would qualify has a solid result for Puneet Jaggi — selling a company to a global tech giant is a vote of confidence in his many businesses. Puneet Jaggi and his elder brother Anmol Jaggi had founded solar energy provider Gensol in 2007, which went public in 2019 and is currently valued at Rs. 3,200 crore. Meanwhile, the duo along with Punit Goyal had founded BluSmart, which runs electric cabs services that compete with Uber and Ola, and was last valued at over $250 million (Rs. 2,200 crore). And Puneet Jaggi has now sold their third company to IBM, which adds to the already glittering resume for the Jaggi brothers. In an environment where exits are few and far between, Anmol and Puneet Jaggi have created three companies in the clean energy space — and seem to be going from strength to strength in each.