India is the biggest prize in tech. Meet the gatekeeper

Rishi Iyengar from cnn said that Between March and November last year, even as the coronavirus upended lives and devastated economies around the world, India’s richest man was handed more than $27 billion to make a bet on the future of the internet.

More than half that eye-popping amount came from Silicon Valley. It started with $5.7 billion from Facebook in March, one of the biggest investments in the American company’s history. Silver Lake Partners, the private equity firm based eight miles from Facebook’s (FB) Menlo Park headquarters, followed with its own investment just weeks later, as did Palo Alto’s General Atlantic and San Francisco-headquartered TPG Capital.

Smaller investments from Qualcomm (QCOM) and Intel (INTC) came next, before Google (GOOGL) swooped in with $4.5 billion to swell the impressive war chest.

The recipient of all those billions is Jio Platforms, part of Ambani’s sprawling conglomerate Reliance Industries. Jio started as a mobile network in 2016. Since then it has amassed around 400 million users and launched a streaming service, a video conferencing app, a fiber broadband network and digital payments.

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