Bangalore:  American Express is making an investment of $4.5 million in a Bangalore-based startup called 'Capillary Technologies'. This is the first investment in an Indian firm by the U.S. financial services corporation, American Express. Last year, Capillary raised $15.5 million from investors like Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners and Qualcomm Ventures.

The partnership also involves a joint marketing agreement. American Express will introduce Capillary's customer engagement solutions to a few chosen retail merchants in the U.S. Capillary will in turn help American Express by providing software solutions. The software offered not only collects data about customers from a variety of sources, it analyzes them and then makes real-time personalized decisions. This is said to increase shopper loyalty and bring in more online and physical store sales.

After passing out from IIT, Kharagpur, Aneesh Reddy and Krishna Mehra laid the foundation of Capillary in 2008. Although their initial focus was the Indian market, they soon realized that the software could work equally well in advanced countries. Now, they are present in 16 countries, across 10,000 stores impacting 100 million end customers. Pizza Hut, Puma, M&S, Nike, Raymond and Lifestyle run solutions developed by Capillary.

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