Cognizant closes two mega deals in past month

Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp closed two mega deals worth more than $500 million each in the past month despite geopolitical and macroeconomic headwinds, a top company executive said this week.

The Teaneck, New Jersey-based Indian heritage firm closed the deals–one in the communications, media, and tech (CMT) space and the other in health sciences. More than three-fourths of Cognizant’s employees are based in India.

Cognizant president for the Americas Surya Gummadi, who made the disclosure, did not specify the clients’ names.

The story was first reported by Mint, which learnt that Cognizant may have renewed its partnership with UnitedHealth Group (UHG).

“This is a transformation deal. The deal that we (just) closed is approximately, you know, around a billion dollars,” Gummadi said in a fireside chat with Jason Kupferberg, a senior analyst with Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Elaborating, Gummadi said “this (the deal) has an element of renewal, the element of expansion, and new as well. So that new business, it has all three components.”

“And the way we are approaching these mega deals is, you know, unlock the trapped value in the run component of the business and use that to fund transformation powered by AI, which is leverage AI to unlock productivity in a segment of business and use that unlocked value to fund transformation and innovation, again, by AI,” Gummadi said.

UnitedHealth is among the largest clients for Cognizant, which has had a two-decade-old partnership with the former, with the health sciences vertical alone pulling off one-third of the IT firm’s full-year revenue of $19.7 billion at the end of 2024.