The Infosys mafia in action: Narayana Murthy invests in Coverfox while Nandan Nilekani backs Mubble

In 1981, seven friends pooled in INR 10,000 (US$250 back then) to start Infosys, an IT services company. Today, it has a market cap of US$40.41 billion and is the second largest IT services company in India by revenue.

Four of those Infosys co-founders, N.R. Narayana Murthy, Nandan Nilekani, S.D. Shibulal, and K. Dinesh, sold shares worth US$1.1 billion last year. They have used this money to invest in hand-picked startups across India.

The Infosys headquarters in Bengaluru, India

The latest ones to get backing from the seasoned entrepreneurs are online insurance portal Coverfox and prepaid mobile account tracker Mubble. Murthy’s private investment firm, Catamaran Ventures invested in Coverfox and Nilekani made a personal investment in Mubble.

Insurance cover in 5 minutes

The Catamaran investment in Coverfox is part of a series B round of US$14 million led by Accel USA, Accel India, and SAIF Partners.

Coverfox helps customers compare insurance prices, buy policies, and navigate the otherwise complicated claims process. According to its website, a customer can get insured in less than 5 minutes. It expects to reach 1 million users by the end of the year.

Coverfox enters the online insurance space at a promising time. Only 3.9 percent of India’s population is insured, compared to the world average of 6.3 percent, Varun Dua, CEO of Coverfox, pointed out in an official statement about the funding. According to a report by BCG and Google, three out of four insurance transactions will involve some aspect of the internet by the year 2020.

Murthy’s US$130 million venture capital fund, Catamaran Ventures, has been investing across sectors. Its first bet was on controversial microfinance entity SKS Microfinance. SKS provided financial services to economically disadvantaged borrowers and tanked after having difficulty recovering loans.

Last year, Catamaran entered a joint venture with Amazon Asia in order to help small and medium-sized businesses in India get onto the ecommerce platform.

Itemized bill for your prepaid account

Nandan Nilekani’s pick Mubble allows prepaid mobile subscribers to track data usage and spending by maintaining a live itemized bill. After a call, SMS or data session, users are notified of their charges and the remaining balance in their prepaid account. The inbuilt data crunching analytics tool works across multiple SIMs and is available in local languages, including Hindi, Marathi, and Tamil.

Mubble was founded in 2013 by three friends, Ashwin Ramaswamy (IIT Madras, IIM Bangalore), Pranav Jha (IIT Bombay), and Raghvendra Varma (IIT BHU). The investment money will go toward building Mubble’s engineering team. The funding is part of a series A round for Mubble.

Mubble claims that its app has had over 500,000 downloads since it went live six months ago.