AI-powered Analytics Startup PredictiVu Raises $1.5 Mn in Pre-Seed Funding from Market Xcel, Nomura and Infobridge Asia

PredictiVu, India’s leading analytics startup, announced raising $1.5million in a pre-seed funding round led by Market Xcel Data Matrix, backed by Nomura Research Institute (Japan) and Infobridge Asia (Japan).

Gurugram based business-to-business tech company plans to use the capital for product development, bolstering their existing AI capabilities and diversifying their product line. PredictiVu is India’s first of its kind analytics startup, that addresses the incumbent data latency and data silos challenges of marketing to deliver near-real time business intelligence insights to marketing leaders 10 times faster than conventional methods. Their flagship product, Dynamic Marketing Optimizer (DMO), a centralised next-gen AI-powered data visualisation tool can analyse data insights 90% faster. This is the first round of funding received post the product going into client Beta testing.

On the occasion, Kunal Sarkar, Vice President, PredictiVu said, “We are extremely glad to have such a stellar set of investors back us up on our mission. This will help us to add more AI/ML capabilities into our product line and provide personalized, accurate real-time insights to our partners. The pandemic has entirely altered the consumer behavior and has accelerated the need to track insights faster for the hypercompetitive offline smartphone retail market. We will continue to take a unique discovery approach and make BI insights delivery seamless for brands, retailers and marketers. With new mergers and key smartphone players eyeing to double their offline presence, offline retail will dominate smartphone sales in coming months and marketers will seek closer and in-depth insights to tap its intrinsic growth potential. We will be betting big on that.”

Raja Vishal Oberoi, CEO, Market Xcel, said, “Our confidence in PredictiVu emanates from their impressive and unique product solutions, approach and offering capabilities. There is a latent need for such near real-time multi-dimensional data mapping using AI / ML modules in marketing and PredictiVu’s perfect blend of concepts, experience in delivering BI insights and outcome-driven approach makes them extremely suited to lead India’s next level data interpretation need. We are delighted to associate ourselves in their journey of addressing the untapped need-gap for the marketers and make their mark in the growing data analytics segment.”

PredictiVu’s dashboard is connected to 75,000 retail touchpoints with a presence in 150+ Indian cities that keeps adding 2 million+ unique consumer data points every month. Going forward, PredictiVu team aims to diversify focus and deliver near-real time BI insights on India’s retail market which is projected to reach $1.3 trillion by 2024.

About PredictiVu: PredictiVu is India first of its kind analytics startup and one-stop solution for CMOs and marketers, specialized in correlating marketing campaign performance at an immense granular level to deliver near-real-time BI insights 10 times faster than traditional methods. With AI/ML powered data visualisation tools and solutions, the team aims to deliver exceptionally agile, flexible, reliable consolidated, and holistic insights for marketers to drive business growth for enterprises and brands. They are expertized in mapping micro-level competitor performance and maximizing RoI on live campaigns. Headquartered at Gurugram, PredictiVu’s investors include Nomura Research Institute and Info-bridge Marketing and Promotions Co. Ltd. which bring in decades of industry, analytics, and consulting experience. For more info, visit, https://predictivu.com/

Location Analytics Startup Locale.ai Raises Funding From Better Capital & Notable Angels

Rishabh Jain and Aditi Sinha started Locale.ai to help every company with moving assets (goods, delivery partners,sales partners, vehicles etc) increase revenues and get more sustainable demand using real time location data & analytics. 

The startup today announced that it has raised an undisclosed round of funding led by Better Capital with participation from notable angels such as Myntra & Nudgespot co-founder Raveen Sastry and Fusion Charts co-founder Pallav Nadhani in a pre-seed round. 

Since the Covid outbreak, online delivery has been powering the world and location analytics has become the need of the hour for last-mile delivery. They have seen a huge spike in demand from food, grocery, medicine delivery companies who want to reach their customers as soon as possible and get to 100% booking fullfitment.

Their product helps businesses maximize on the number of high-valued customers, increase frequency as well as their repeatability, thereby improving the topline. 

“We help companies decrease their customer acquisition cost by expanding in areas based on latent demand, reduce user churn by providing better SLAs in locations where they drop-off and increase existing customer revenue by doing geo-targeting based on users they move and where they order from” says Aditi Sinha, co-founder of Locale.ai and an alumnus of BITS Pilani. 

In a world where user acquisition and retention on the web is focused on creating user cohorts and targeting them differently, Locale’s aim is to help these companies that have operations in a real-world incorporate the “location” element and go super targeted and granular in their strategies.

They have established partnerships with data vendors to help companies overlay granular external data such as mobility patterns in a city, traffic, weather on top of their internal data to get more robust insights. 

“Location is at the core of the strategies that companies use to capture demand and Locale is the fastest way for any company to convert location data into easily searchable intelligence and the right insights”, said Vaibhav Domkundwar of Better Capital, a seed fund with early bets in category defining businesses like Open, Khatabook, Bijak, Yulu & others.

Locale was founded in 2019 and is already working with mobility and delivery companies in the US, France, Argentina and India. The funding will be utilized to scale and expand globally, primarily in the US.

Today, they are ingesting around 1 million location events per day and claim to increase the user conversion percentage by 3x & asset utilization rate by 35% using granular and targeted geo-promotions and provisioning supply in the right locations.They also have made the integrations really simple so that companies can get up and running in a span of a couple of hours. 

News Corp Acquires Bengaluru Based GyanMatrix

Media and information services company, News Corp has acquired GyanMatrix Services Private Limited. With this acquisition New Crop has announced the expansion of its global technology and information services along with rebranding the new company as News Technology Services (NTS). Rajan Parasuraman, founder of GMX, will stay on to lead the company as Managing Director.

Commenting on the development, Dominic Shine, Global CIO of News Corp said, “The acquisition of News Technology Services is key to our global technology strategy and the amazing team in India are a big part of our growth plans. We plan to double the size of the team in Bengaluru within 6 months so that the entire News Corp group can benefit from their energy, innovation and technical expertise.”

NTS will work directly with News Corp’s global brands to offer a range of technology services, including web development, application support, infrastructure management and cyber operations. The approach will allow NTS to augment each company’s individual technology teams, particularly in skillsets that are difficult to recruit in local markets.

NTS is a digital product development company, specialising in mobile, web and data engineering, and data science and analytics. Recently, the company expanded and diversified its services to provide enterprise application development, cyber operations and infrastructure operations services for a number of News Corp businesses, including News UK Ltd, News Corp Australia and Dow Jones.

“This deal is an extension of our ongoing work supporting the digital innovation underway at News UK. We are looking forward to expanding our efforts globally to provide News Corp with best-in-class service and support,” said Rajan Parasuraman, Managing Director of NTS.

NTS will expand its operations and infrastructure, including the creation of over 120 new jobs in India, adding to an existing workforce of 170 employees. The new office space in Electronic City, Bengaluru, will be expanded to accommodate more staff in an upgraded suite of state-of-the art offices. The company plans to recruit for a range of roles, including infrastructure technology and operations, application development, data science and digital product development.

News Corp already has a significant presence in India through its Dow Jones, Wall Street Journal and HarperCollins Publishers businesses. In recent years, the company has also acquired VCCircle and a stake in Elara Technologies, which includes the digital real estate properties PropTiger, Housing.com and Makaan.

Mumbai based startup WizRocket gets funding from Accel Partners

US based Venture and growth equity firm Accel Partners has invested an undisclosed amount of funds in SaaS based Mumbai startup WizRocket.

WizRocket is a user behavior analysis & targeting tool that helps web businesses interact with their users across offline and online mediums. It enables web businesses to do web messaging, push notifications, in-app messaging and even reach out to customers via SMS or Email.

Founded in 2013 Wizrocket by former Network18 executives Sunil Thomas, Suresh Kondamudi and Anand Jain (co-founder of Burrp) WinzRocket is currently in private beta with 25 global customers. The product is set to open for other customers in September this year. The startup presently have team of just 10 people in its office.

Some of the WizRocket customers include Bookmyshow, Pricebaba, Homeshop18 and Nasdaq-listed mobile advertising firm Marchex.

WizRocket let websites discover the who (people), what (events) and why (behavior) on their own websites and mobile apps and then apply behavior targeting to improve retention, engagement and conversion rates. The analytics and the targeting are dashboard driven.

The big breakthrough that WizRocket has achieved recenlty is the ability to query 100 million data points in less than 200ms on a small sized AWS EC2 instance. This enables quick segmentation to study several facets of user behavior.

Since 1983, Accel Partners has invested in over 300 companies and manages over $8.8 billion from offices in Palo Alto, California, New York City, London, India and China.