Google Cloud turns first profits; Microsoft tops estimates; Capria marks first close of new $100 mln fund

Microsoft and Google both surprised the street yesterday, beating analysts’ estimates. Google also saw its cloud business turn a profit for the first time since the unit’s launch. Also in this brief, Microsoft’s Anant Maheshwari is named Nasscom chair; WhatsApp can now be used on multiple phones; Xerox to donate PARC to SRI; and Capria Ventures announced the first close of its second fund, which has a target of $100 million, to continue to invest in tech-led startups in the “global south,” the VC firm said in a press release.

Notes:

Microsoft, yesterday, beat street expectations, driven by growth in its cloud computing and Office productivity software businesses, and the company said artificial intelligence products were boosting sales, The Guardian reports.

The company also forecast that revenue in its main segments for the current quarter would match or top Wall Street targets.

Meanwhile, Anant Maheshwari, President and CEO of Microsoft India has been named Chairperson of Nasscom, India’s biggest technology lobby, for the current fiscal year that started April 1, The Hindu reports.

Coming back to big tech earnings, sales at Google also rose, unexpectedly, for the Jan-March period, which is the Alphabet company’s fiscal first quarter. Google reported first-quarter revenue of $69.8 billion, up 3 percent year-over-year and above analyst predictions of $68.9 billion.

Google reported cloud revenue of $7.4 billion in Q1 of 2023, up 27.5 percent from $5.8 billion in the year-ago period, and with a $191 million profit, the first since the internet search giant started breaking out cloud earnings, compared with an operating income loss of $706 million a year ago.

WhatsApp, yesterday announced a new much sought-after feature, the Meta unit said in a press release. Following up on last year’s rollout of the ability for users to message on all their devices, WhatsApp has now introduced the ability to use the same WhatsApp account on multiple phones.

Now you can link your phone as one of up to four additional devices, the same as when you link with WhatsApp on web browsers, tablets and desktops, the company said in a post.

This update has started rolling out to users globally and will be available to everyone in the coming weeks.

In once-big-tech news, Xerox is donating its famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to SRI International, a non-profit research and innovation institute. Researchers at the two organizations will collaborate on developing technologies and scientific research, while Xerox said it will focus on its “core, digital and IT services,” Quartz reports.

Roughly 1,000 employees from PARC will join SRI, and contribute to its research areas, which include computer vision, AI and machine learning, and robotics. Both organizations have worked in the innovation space for decades, creating technology that has come to define the Internet age, Quartz notes.

In some venture capital news, Capria Ventures, a US-based VC firm that has backed several Indian startups attempting to solve local problems with world-class tech-based innovations, yesterday announced the first close of its new $100 million fund.

The new fund, Capria Fund II, will focus on investing in 20-25 tech startups in the entrepreneurial hotspots of India, Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa, the firm said in a press release.