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Wipro lands $1bn Olam deal, to acquire IT arm Mindsprint in mega pact
Eight-year AI-led partnership targets farm-to-fork transformation at scale
BENGALURU: Wipro Limited has secured one of its largest transformation mandates, signing an eight-year strategic deal with Olam Group that is expected to exceed $1 billion in value.
As part of the agreement, Wipro will also acquire Mindsprint, Olam’s IT and digital services arm, in a move that deepens its industry expertise and strengthens its capabilities in the food and agri-business sector. The acquisition, subject to regulatory approvals, is expected to close by the end of June 2026.
Headquartered in Singapore and backed by Temasek Holdings, Olam Group operates across the global food supply chain, employing nearly 40,000 people. The partnership with Wipro is aimed at accelerating its transformation into a more agile and future-ready enterprise.
Under the deal, Wipro will deliver end-to-end transformation services across Olam’s ‘farm-to-fork’ value chain, spanning farming, forecasting, trading, supply chain operations and customer engagement. The engagement will lean heavily on Wipro’s consulting-led approach and its AI-powered suite, Wipro Intelligence, to drive efficiency, resilience and long-term growth.
Olam Group co-founder and group CEO Sunny Verghese said, “We are pleased to partner with Wipro on our transformation journey. Wipro’s scale, consulting-led approach and innovation investments position it well to advance our mission-critical programmes and drive scalable outcomes.”
He added that combining Mindsprint’s domain expertise with Wipro’s global capabilities would create “powerful synergies for growth and end-to-end transformation across the value chain”.
For Wipro, the deal marks a significant push to scale its presence in the agri and food sector. Wipro Limited chief executive officer and managing director Srini Pallia said, “This engagement is an important step in expanding our farm-to-fork capabilities and scaling the impact of Wipro Intelligence across the food and agri-business industry.”
He also welcomed Mindsprint’s workforce of over 3,200 professionals, noting that their domain expertise and proprietary platforms would help unlock new growth opportunities and accelerate innovation.
Mindsprint has played a key role in Olam’s digital transformation journey, offering specialised solutions across supply chain, procurement, sales and commodity trading. Its integration into Wipro is expected to bolster the latter’s ability to deliver industry-specific, IP-led solutions at scale.
With the global food supply chain under increasing pressure to be more efficient and resilient, the Wipro-Olam partnership highlights how technology, data and domain expertise are coming together to reshape the sector. For Wipro, it is not just a big deal, but a strategic bite into a high-growth market.
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Tessolve lands a semiconductor veteran to drive its next big push
Ravi Kumar Chirugudu, who started his career at ISRO and has spent 35 years building chips and companies, joins the Bengaluru-based firm as president and chief operating officer
BENGALURU: Tessolve has never been shy about its ambitions. The Bengaluru-based engineering services firm already counts 18 of the world’s top 20 semiconductor companies among its clients, employs more than 3,500 engineers across 12 countries, and last year pocketed a $150m investment from TPG. Now it has hired the executive it believes can turn those assets into something bigger. Ravi Kumar Chirugudu, a 35-year semiconductor veteran who once built satellite payloads for ISRO and has since scaled engineering organisations across three continents, joins as president and chief operating officer, effective immediately.
THE MAN AND THE MANDATE
The appointment is, by any measure, a serious hire. Ravi Kumar Chirugudu comes to Tessolve after senior leadership stints at HCL Technologies, Altran and Wipro, where he managed large profit-and-loss portfolios and oversaw cross-regional teams. Over the course of his career, he has been instrumental in bringing more than 1,000 new products to market across the high-tech, energy and manufacturing verticals. Before the private sector claimed him, he began his working life as a scientist at the Indian Space Research Organisation, contributing to research and development in charge-coupled device technology and satellite payloads, a foundation that shaped everything that followed.
In his new role, he will lead Tessolve’s global growth strategy: expanding its engineering capabilities, deepening customer relationships and accelerating innovation across semiconductor and high-performance computing domains. The brief is broad, but the context is specific. Tessolve operates in the $550 billion global semiconductor market, and its recent moves, the acquisition of Germany’s Dream Chip Technologies and the TPG funding round, have sharpened both its reach and its expectations.
Srini Chinamilli, co-founder and chief executive of Tessolve, is characteristically direct about why Ravi Kumar Chirugudu was the choice:
“As we scale our global semiconductor and system engineering capabilities, Ravi’s appointment marks an important step forward. As global semiconductor demand continues to accelerate across industries, it is creating significant opportunities across the semiconductor lifecycle, from design, packaging, validation and systems integration. Ravi’s deep knowledge and leadership in this ecosystem brings the right mix of industry expertise, customer connect and execution capability, which will play a key role in strengthening our position as a trusted global engineering partner and reinforcing our market leadership.”
THE NEW ARRIVAL SPEAKS
Ravi Kumar Chirugudu, for his part, frames the move in terms of timing and culture, two factors that veteran executives tend to weigh as heavily as title or compensation:
“I am happy to join Tessolve at a time when the industry is rapidly evolving towards more complex, AI-driven systems. What stands out to me is its strong people-first culture and its commitment to bringing value to its customers. The strength of its global team, combined with its deep expertise in semiconductor innovation and next-generation product engineering, creates a solid foundation to build differentiated, scalable solutions. I look forward to working closely with the team to drive strategic growth and strengthen its role in shaping the global semiconductor ecosystem.”
The reference to AI-driven systems is not incidental. The semiconductor industry is in the midst of a structural reshaping, driven by the insatiable compute demands of artificial intelligence. For engineering services firms like Tessolve, which offers end-to-end capabilities from silicon design to packaged parts and invests in high-performance computing, high-speed interfaces, photonics and 5G, the moment is both an opportunity and a test. The company says it is well positioned to capture the next wave of industry growth. Ravi Kumar Chirugudu is now the person who has to prove it.
He came in from outer space, literally, and spent three decades learning how the semiconductor industry works from the inside out. Now Tessolve is betting that accumulated knowledge can help it cross the next frontier. In the $550 billion global chip market, the gap between ambition and execution is measured in engineering hours and leadership quality. Tessolve has just gone shopping for both.
