Cyanogen plans to invest $80 million in start-up acquisitions in India.

Open source mobile OS developer Cyanogen plans to open an office in India in the next three months. According to reports, the company plans to invest $80 million to acquire start-ups in the country. The company’s India team will be located either in Delhi or Bangalore and will have at least 50 employees, representing a third of its current employee base.Reportedly, Cyanogen plans to hire more people to add local flavors to its custom Android operating system in the form of some local apps and features. Quality testing and assurance in the country will also be done from the new base.

The company has raised over $110 million in funding till date of which $80 million came in just this march from Premji Invest, Twitter Ventures, Qualcomm and others. Cyanogen plans to invest a large part of the funding into acquiring smaller companies and teams in India. Vikram Natarajan, senior vice-president of global partnerships and distribution at Cyanogen stated, “India is very attractive. It is one of the hyper-growth markets for mobile today, … Premji Invest is a big investor…and that was a deliberate decision, as India a big market for us.” "What we strongly believe that global giants don't is that any country with a large population will have the rise of a local ecosystem. We're going to start seeing that in India," he added.CyanogenMod was an open source project that tinkered with the Android in 2009.

The company has now over 9,000 contributing members. The company’s founders "Kirt McMaster and Steve Kondik" made Cyanogen a commercial entity in 2013 headquartered in Palo Alto. According to research firm eMarketer, India is poised to overtake US as the fastest-growing smartphone market in 2016, making it very attractive to domestic as well as international companies.

Cyanogen already has a deal with Micromax to exclusively install its Cyanogen OS onto the company’s handsets. Natarajan added that the company will see how the expansion pans out and then it will decide whether to partner up with more local brands.