New Delhi, Aug. 20 -- CtrlS Datacenters Ltd, one of the largest hyperscale data centre operators in India that counts Canada Pension Plan Investment Board as a key investor, has raised Rs 250 crore ($26.1 million) in fresh funding from Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath and entrepreneur Sreeram Reddy Vanga.
Kamath infused Rs 200 crore into the company while Vanga put in Rs 50 crore, according to a statement.
CtrlS plans to use the capital for infrastructure expansion and capacity build-out to meet growing enterprise and hyperscaler demand across India, particularly as AI, cloud, and digital workloads accelerate, it said in a statement.
"Over the years, we have built CtrlS with a long-term vision of where India's digital economy is headed and the digital infrastructure it will require," said Sridhar Pinnapureddy, founder and chief executive, CtrlS Datacenters. "What excites me about this partnership is the alignment in that long-term vision. It gives us the ability to think bigger, move faster, and continue building datacenter platforms that will support India's next phase of growth.
The funding comes two months after CPPIB, one of the biggest foreign institutional investors into the Indian infrastructure sector, said it was investing up to Rs 7,000 crore (about $740 million) into CtrlS.
The pension fund said at the time it would invest around Rs 4,000 crore to acquire an 8.2% stake in CtrlS, valuing CtrlS around Rs 44,824 crore ($4.74 billion) on a pre-money basis. It would also form a joint venture with CtrlS to develop hyperscale data centre campuses across India, with CPPIB committing Rs 3,000 crore for a 48% stake and CtrlS holding the remaining 52%.
The company, founded in 2007, set up its first data centre in Hyderabad in 2009. The company currently has 19 operational data centres across nine locations. These include Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Noida, Lucknow, Patna, Bengaluru and Kolkata.
The company mainly offers two types of services-co-location services and managed hosting services. Its co-location services allow customers to bring in their own rack-mountable servers and house them in shared racks or hire complete racks. It also offers managed hosting services such as storage, back-up and restoration, performance monitoring and reporting, hardware and software procurement and network configuration.
CtrlS says its clientele is diversified and spans global cloud providers, large enterprises, and small and medium businesses, including technology companies and banking, financial services and insurance companies.
"Every meaningful technology shift of the next decade, AI, cloud, and digital public infrastructure, runs on data centres. India is at an inflection point where the underlying infrastructure either keeps pace or becomes the bottleneck. CtrlS has spent years building the kind of depth that does not get assembled overnight. That is what made this an easy decision," said Kamath.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from VC Circle.