The largest mobile operator in Japan, NTT Docomo, announced it will invest $20 million in the Tata Capital Growth Fund II in Singapore, with a focus on growth-stage start-up companies in India.

The operator set up a partnership with Tata Sons aimed at driving industrial development in both Japan and India by identifying investment opportunities in promising growth fields such as IT services, healthcare and financial services, it said in a statement.

The fund will be managed by Tata Capital Growth II General Partners, which is an indirect subsidiary of Tata Capital.

In April, rival KDDI set up a fund in partnership with venture capital company Global Brain to invest JPY20 billion over the next five years in companies which can boost its 5G ambitions. The KDDI Open Innovation Fund 3 initially invested JPY5 billion in three programmes around AI, IoT and data marketing, as part of the first two phases of the initiative.

SoftBank, the third largest mobile operator in Japan, announced in July it lined up about $108 billion in contributions for its second Vision Fund. The Japanese company launched the first Vision Fund in 2016 which attracted nearly $100 billion in investment.