HCL Technologies Limited

It's also usually the first step toward an employment-based green card.

On October 8, Vice President J.D. Vance and Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling announced that eight companies had been suspended – Adobe, Capgemini, Cognizant, HCL Technologies, Infosys, Microsoft, Tata Consultancy Services, and Wipro.

Sonderling said those firms had received more than 100,000 permanent labor certifications since 2009, along with about 230,000 H-1B visa approvals.

the Labor Department said it won't accept new perm applications or process pending ones involving the suspended companies during the suspension.

Now, Agrani is valued at 300 to 350 million now after the round, a more than eightfold jump from its roughly $35 million valuation when it raised its seed round.

Now, who's in the mix? Well, Grow Founders' new Stargazer fund, Google and HCL Tech are looking to join the round, sources told us.

This, in fact, will be Groww Founders Fund Stargazer's first investment.

Peak 15 partners and existing investor N361 remain in the fray, apart from Samsung.

HCL's tech centrist Agrani marks its second reported bet on an Indian startup this year after AI company Sarvam.

Now, this makes its semiconductor interest worth watching.

HCL Tech appears willing to back companies building the technology stack of the next decade rather than simply selling services around it.

Now, there's another silver lining here.

And a spot job like that, you're not going to bring on an entirely new operation to do so.

You know, if a TCS or Wipro or an HCL is willing to jump in and do that at a really great competitive rate, that's fantastic.

So IT services, I mean, it was three.

I remember talking to companies when the IT boom was happening and you still had, you know, like with the parliament attacks and troops mounted at the border, a lot of skittishness.

By the usual scorecard, India's big IT firms had a decent quarter.

Operating margins actually went up for HCL Tech, Wipro, and Tech Mahindra, while TCS and Infosys held steady.

But for a business threatened by AI, margins holding steady is no more the metric by which we judge health.

After all, the trajectory with new technologies usually follows the path of slowly, then all at once.

But AI has now become the new pretext to ask for less.

On genuinely new AI work, firms still charge a premium since it's scarce and clients don't fully know yet what it's worth.

HCL Tech, for instance, said its AI-enabled IT services work yields 7-10% higher margins than traditional services.

This could involve building new agentic workflows, training in-house small language models, or creating new IP.

India's top five IT services firms reported strong AI revenue and productivity gains in Q2, but revenue per employee has barely budged for the last five quarters.

By numbers, TCS Infosys, HCL Tech and Wipro recorded year-on-year growth of just 0.55% to 1.5% in quarterly revenue per employee.

Tech Mahindra, however, was the outlier with a 7% growth to $11,123.

Now, if you look at Anthropix revenue per employee, that actually topped $6.6 million, more than 100 times the figure at TCS at Infosys highlighting the vast gap between AI-native firms and traditional IT services.

Now, Infosys was the last of the top five to report earnings.

Earlier, TCS and HCL Tech met street top-line estimates, and investors cheered the uptick in AI revenue.

So the top-line estimates were not much to cheer about, but the AI revenue composition was.

Infosys had cut its fiscal 2027 revenue growth forecast to 1% to 2% from 1.5% to 3%.

And that brings me to an Indian corporate story.

In the mid 2000s, HCL Technologies was operating in a fiercely competitive global IT services industry.

Vineet Nair, who took charge of the company's transformation in 2005, later became its CEO, began questioning an assumption about management.

Who actually creates the value that customers pay for? Was it the senior leadership team making presentations and reviewing strategy or was much of the value created by employees working directly with clients, solving technical problems and delivering services.

The idea was not that customers no longer mattered.

It was that employees working with customers needed an organization designed to support their judgment and effectiveness.

Rather than treating management functions purely as authorities that employees reported to, HCL introduced practices intended to make those functions answerable to employees.

Employees gained greater opportunities to question management.