Blockchain-based Loan Marketplace Streamsource Raises $1 Mn Seed Funding from Accel India

Gurgaon-based StreamSource Technologies, a decentralized marketplace for loans, has raised $1 million in seed funding from Accel India, making it Accel’s first local investment in the blockchain sector.

Interestingly, StreamSource was founded in 2018 by a former Uber and an Ola executive -- Mayank Tewari and Prerit Srivastava, respectively. While Mayank was General Manager of Products at Uber, Prerit was CEO of Qarth Technologies, which was aquired by Ola in 2016 and he was at Products team at Ola.

The startup will utilize the funds raised in further developing its product, while also growing its sales team in the US and hiring local resources in markets such as Australia and UK where it plans to go next. The startup also is working to expand the product bring in merchants, apart from just lenders, who will be able to sell leads to the lenders on its platform.

StreamSource, a Quorum based private blockchain platform, is a decentralized marketplace where lenders and debt buyers can initiate and settle transactions that includes buying and selling of credit approved leads and whole loan transactions.

Quorum is an enterprise-focused version of variant of the Ethereum blockchain, developed by J.P. Morgan.

Streamsource is currently working with a few mid-size lenders in the US, the names of which it did not disclose.

The company said it picked the US as it first market as the decision making for processing of unsecured loans in India is far deeper, more complex and requires manual intervention.

“The problem has been known for years, but it hasn’t been solved because traditional technologies are generally very inefficient in transactions like this where both parties do not want data to be shared but they want to collaborate,” said Prerit Srivastava, co-founder of Streamsource.

Prayank Swaroop, Principal at Accel Partners, said, “We’ve been trying to do investments in this space for the longest time, but what we found was people were artificially trying to create blockchain use cases. Here we found that this is a business need and that gave us confidence to invest in them."

Source - Economic Times - ET Tech

HR Tech Startup 'Hush' Raises ₹4.5 Cr from Accel and Shamik Sharma

Bangalore-based Hush, an employee-focused HR tech firm founded by two former Yahoo employees, has raised ₹ 4.5 crores (~ US$ 641,000) in a fresh round of funding on the back of an unexpected growth in user acceptance of their platform. Emerging as the go-to workplace app for employees from over 300 companies, Hush has also gained a higher number of employees within each company ‘cohorts’. Existing investors, Accel, Shamik Sharma (Business Head at Curefit), and an angel investor participated in the round.

Additionally, the company has added Nikhil Raj, Co-Founder of Paysa.com, to their advisory board.

The new round of funds will be utilised to expand the Hush team, grow the platform’s user base, and most importantly, launch new features on the app.

Founded in September 2017, by Ashutosh Dabral and Umesh Joshi [L-R in above picture], Hush is an employee-focused HR tech firm that provides a voice to employees and helps them move to the next level in their career. The platform also allows verified employees to rate their CEOs and CXOs. Employees of startups such as Flipkart, Ola and Practo and larger firms like Accenture, Adobe, IBM, TCS, and Infosys use Hush to get answers to their workplace and career related queries.

Before founding Hush, both of its co-founders Dabral and Joshi, had earlier worked together at Yahoo for 2.5 years and later launched their first venture together in 2016 with expertise in product management and building cutting-edge technology for consumer tech products. The duo have expertise in product management and building cutting-edge technology for consumer tech products.

The fresh raise will strengthen the brand’s growth narrative and help them reach out to a wider audience through the introduction of cutting-edge technology. Ranging from career advice to various internal discussions, the platform has seen a wide range of use cases over the course of time. With the inclusion of new-age tech, Hush looks to create more features for employees to have access to.

At present, a user spends an average of 10 minutes per day on the app. Moving forward, Hush predicts the platform will onboard an additional 1000 companies within a year. The company has also observed an uptick in the usage of their platform’s newly-launched modules ‘Salary Data’ and ‘Career Advice.’

“One of our key responsibilities at Hush is to deliver authentic data to employees about various organisations so as to help them take better career decisions. The app is also helping employees voice their opinions anonymously about issues that they are facing in corporates, which provides valuable insights to employers and helps them take important business decisions,” Ashutosh Dabral, Co-Founder of Hush commented.

Dabral added, “We are extremely thrilled to have received support from Accel as it adds a lot of credibility to our existing business model. Excited with the increased demand from our consumers, our fresh raise is focused on expanding our technology to include a wider range of audiences with more use cases. The expanded capital base will also help us build better features, expand the team, and develop the platform’s user base.”

Hush began as a workplace discussion app for employees in September 2017. Now, it is on the path to become a platform that can be a companion throughout an employee’s career and help them move to the next level. In October 2018, they launched their new website https://hush.company/ that aims to be an authentic source of information about a company, including details such as salary levels, data culture descriptions.

Hush entered the market to tackle the growing need for employees to express their real opinions, discuss pressing concerns, and pose difficult questions on topics that are important to them on a common platform. As a lot of discussions on the platform were about salary levels and career growth, Hush launched the new modules on their website to better address user needs. The Hush platform now has communities from 300+ companies and reliable salary data for 700+ companies sourced from employees, HR professionals, and recruitment consultants. The company is also building a large scale machine learning model to predict salary levels and help people evaluate what salary they will be able to get based on their skill levels. It also provides career advice to employees via a network of experts.

Over the years, leading venture capitalists have invested over INR 1000 crore in the promising HR-tech startups, which have gained considerable momentum with the active role of investors in the space.

In March this year, Gurgaon based HR Technology startup Benepik had raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from a group of investors.

In November last year, Mumbai-based HR tech startup Shortlist raised $1 million in seed funding from US-based venture capital firm University Ventures, ImpactAssets, Bodley Group, Kenya-based seed fund Zephyr Acorn, Samir Shah of Sattva Capital and several other investors from both India and the US.

Online Health and Wellness Startup CureJoy Raises $4.4M Series A Funding Led by Accel Partners India

Online health and wellness startup CureJoy has raised $4.4 million in Series A round led by existing investor Accel Partners India. Several other unnamed investors also participated in the round. Last year in September, Curejoy had raised $1.15 million in funding from Accel Partners.

The startup will use the funds to grow the healthcare verticals it focuses on—fitness, beauty and nutrition; strengthen the team and build a strong tech infrastructure with an emphasis on video content.

San Francisco- and Bangalore-based CureJoy, an online community that connects users with alternative medicine experts, provides curated content on natural health and wellness, mostly in the preventive healthcare segment. With the newly raised capital, it plans to grow the existing verticals and create small business units across six-seven sub-verticals including yoga, pregnancy, recipe and more and explore more advertisement-based revenue streams around video content.

CureJoy primarily targets the US market with natural health content with a focus on preventive healthcare.

The startup doesn’t charge users currently, but plans to launch personalised preventive healthcare services on a freemium model towards the end of this year or early next year. Also, it plans to launch Spanish language content to target Spanish-speaking population in Europe and the Americas.

It plans to partner with experts like Deepak Chopra, offering each expert a dedicated channel on the platform. Initially,  CureJoy was started as a Q&A portal where people could ask questions on health issues then it began providing curated content from experts.

The portal currently has over 5,000 experts from various streams of natural health science, including yoga, ayureveda, naturopathy and traditional Chinese medicine, including acupuncture and acupressure. The firm aims to take the number to 50,000 by 2017.

The startup claims that it has about 14 million monthly visits, growing 100% quarter-on-quarter and expects the website traffic to touch 25 million by this year end.

CureJoy competes with portals like Everyday Health Inc, WebMD, an online portal offering medical news and information and lifestyle media brand Mind Body Green.

Image Source: ShutterStock