Hiranandani lines up Rs 3,500-crore investment for Metaverse

The new venture, Tez Platforms, will focus on technology-led consumer services. The company is currently putting the team together and will work with the industry to develop suitable solutions.

After data centres, Hiranandani Group will invest Rs 3,500 crore over next 2-3 years in technology-led consumer services with its new venture, Tez Platforms. It will focus on the areas such as social media, entertainment, gaming and e-sports.

The company is currently putting the team together and will work with the industry to develop suitable solutions.

Darshan Hiranandani, CEO-Hiranandani Group, in an interaction with Moneycontrol said these solutions could be in the metaverse or mobile phone. “It could be in any extreme you want to take care, whether it’s with VR goggles, whether it’s on a PlayStation, Xbox, or Netflix games, or any different platform.” According to him, the demand for the real world stuff into digital contact  is very high.

“We are calling it the Metaverse because Mark Zuckerberg has decided to call it the metaverse and so we are using that as an example. I honestly don’t know whether there will be one Metaverse or there’ll be hundreds. I suspect there will be competing metaverses,” he said.

But, Darshan explained that the shift in the way entertainment is consumed is real. “If it is real, the point is that I don’t know if it’s for the metaverse or not, but certainly if such a thing will happen and become large enough, gaming and entertainment will be the first,” he explained.

For the company to do that, it is in talks with the international players to work on creating those sorts of infrastructures in India, that will help create digital content.

The company will launch services in 2022, followed by another three in the next year. “Tez Platforms will leverage synergies and talent from various Hiranandani Group entities but also has aggressive plans to hire over 250 employees in FY23. Tez’s initial outlay to launch the services this year will be approximately Rs 1,000 crore. And over the next 2-3 years, we expect to invest approximately Rs 3,500 crore.”

While Darshan did not share more details on the exact nature of the services, he said that they are in talks with the companies like gaming and e-sports to understand how best to develop technology-led services.

“We believe that the potential of digital has barely scratched the surface. We are widening our focus on technology-led, new-age services. Yotta Infrastructure will continue to be the vehicle for us to invest in areas of cloud computing, interconnectivity, enterprise applications and enterprise cyber security technologies, which are enhanced by our hyperscale and edge datacenter roll-outs. Separately, through Tez Platforms we intend to incubate and work with leading technologies and partners (both domestic and global) in other areas as well, in the next steps of our journey,” he said in a statement.

Recently, the group doubled its data centre investment to Rs 30,000 crore on the back of the demand for services, according to reports. In 2019, Hiranandani group partnered with Yotta Infrastructure to set up data centres in India.

https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/hiranandani-group-to-invest-rs-3500-crore-over-2-3-years-in-metaverse-8092071.html/amp