Online Parenting Startup BabyChakra Raises Funding from Mark Mobious, Facebook Director

Mumbai-headquartered BabyChakra, a social discovery platform for young parents in India, has raised fresh funding of an undisclosed amount in its pre-Series-B round from several investors, including Mark Mobius, Equanimity Ventures Fund, Facebook director Anand Chandrasekaran and OYO’s Chief Strategy Officer Maninder Gulati.

Other investors who participated in this round include Gideon Marks, a Silicon Valley investor; Eitan Toledo, senior director at Apple; Mandar Vaidya, former head of healthcare practice for McKinsey India; and B. Ravishankar, former chief human resources officer, HCL Technologies.

Existing investors Arihant Patni, Artha Ventures and Bharat Rawla also participated in the round.

The startup will use the freshly raised capital to further strengthen BabyChakra's regional and language-specific content and communities as well as deepen personalization in the product platform. The funds will also help startup to facilitate broader integrations in the maternity & childcare ecosystem.

Founded in 2015, by a Harvard Business School alumnus, Naiyya Saggi, Babychakra is currently the argest platform for Indian parents to discover care for their families. The platform hosts the largest community of mothers and have also created the first of its kind globally, maternity and childcare marketplace. More than 70% of BabyChakra users are families from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities in India, who use the platform in 10 languages to make critical health and wellness decisions for mothers and children.

Prior to this, BabyChakra had last secured series-A funding from RoundGlass Partners, in October 2016. Prior to that, the startup raised seed funding from Mumbai Angels, Patni Family Office, and Singapore Angel Network.

Naiyya Saggi, also CEO of BabyChakra, has an extensive experience in maternity and child care and has worked with both McKinsey and the Public Health Foundation of India. She is also a Mentor at Facebook's flagship program #SheLeadsTech to support and accelerate Indian women founders in technology.

BabyChakra expects its user base to grow about 5-10 times to touch about 10-15 million users by the end of FY19. “India’s offline baby care market stands at $30 billion, with the online space doubling every year,” said Saggi to Livemint.com.

In September last year, BabyChakra brought on board former FreeCharge executive, Rachita Choudhary, as Head of Engineering and Samarth Sawhney, founding member of Jabong and Hopscotch, as BabyChakra's Head of Growth.

At that time, BabyChakra had said that its planning to bring on board advanced technologies like machine learning and natural language processing to help reach out to hundreds of millions of more parents in a highly personalized way and in a context that is relevant to their child’s overall development, geography, language, and socio-economic factors.

In March this year, RoundGlass Partners, who is also an investor in BabyChakra, had acquired BabyOnBoard, which is an another parenting memories & milestone platform.

In the same month, Healofy, a women-centric, multilingual parenting social network had raised $1 million from Omidyar Network as part of their seed round.

In September of last year, an another woman-led startup Mamaearth had raised $1 million to fund the brand's innovation pipeline for entering into more categories with safer & healthier products for babies & mother starting with the launch of ‘Traditional Recipes’ by Mamaearth a range of wellness solutions for mothers including herb teas & supplements.

BabyChakra competes with other similar platforms including Tinystep, Parenttune, Parentlane, Zen Parent and Babygogo. Flipkart-backed Tinystep raised $2 million in funding early last year.

The parenting market in India is pegged at $30-billion and several app based startups are coming up to provide a platform to new parents seeking guidance on pre and post pregnancy phases.

Source - LiveMint, Economic Times

[Top Featured Image ~ Times of India]

Online Parenting Startup BabyChakra Raises Funding from Mark Mobious, Facebook Director

Mumbai-headquartered BabyChakra, a social discovery platform for young parents in India, has raised fresh funding of an undisclosed amount in its pre-Series-B round from several investors, including Mark Mobius, Equanimity Ventures Fund, Facebook director Anand Chandrasekaran and OYO’s Chief Strategy Officer Maninder Gulati.

Other investors who participated in this round include Gideon Marks, a Silicon Valley investor; Eitan Toledo, senior director at Apple; Mandar Vaidya, former head of healthcare practice for McKinsey India; and B. Ravishankar, former chief human resources officer, HCL Technologies.

Existing investors Arihant Patni, Artha Ventures and Bharat Rawla also participated in the round.

The startup will use the freshly raised capital to further strengthen BabyChakra's regional and language-specific content and communities as well as deepen personalization in the product platform. The funds will also help startup to facilitate broader integrations in the maternity & childcare ecosystem.

Founded in 2015, by a Harvard Business School alumnus, Naiyya Saggi, Babychakra is currently the argest platform for Indian parents to discover care for their families. The platform hosts the largest community of mothers and have also created the first of its kind globally, maternity and childcare marketplace. More than 70% of BabyChakra users are families from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities in India, who use the platform in 10 languages to make critical health and wellness decisions for mothers and children.

Prior to this, BabyChakra had last secured series-A funding from RoundGlass Partners, in October 2016. Prior to that, the startup raised seed funding from Mumbai Angels, Patni Family Office, and Singapore Angel Network.

Naiyya Saggi, also CEO of BabyChakra, has an extensive experience in maternity and child care and has worked with both McKinsey and the Public Health Foundation of India. She is also a Mentor at Facebook's flagship program #SheLeadsTech to support and accelerate Indian women founders in technology.

BabyChakra expects its user base to grow about 5-10 times to touch about 10-15 million users by the end of FY19. “India’s offline baby care market stands at $30 billion, with the online space doubling every year,” said Saggi to Livemint.com.

In September last year, BabyChakra brought on board former FreeCharge executive, Rachita Choudhary, as Head of Engineering and Samarth Sawhney, founding member of Jabong and Hopscotch, as BabyChakra's Head of Growth.

At that time, BabyChakra had said that its planning to bring on board advanced technologies like machine learning and natural language processing to help reach out to hundreds of millions of more parents in a highly personalized way and in a context that is relevant to their child’s overall development, geography, language, and socio-economic factors.

In March this year, RoundGlass Partners, who is also an investor in BabyChakra, had acquired BabyOnBoard, which is an another parenting memories & milestone platform.

In the same month, Healofy, a women-centric, multilingual parenting social network had raised $1 million from Omidyar Network as part of their seed round.

In September of last year, an another woman-led startup Mamaearth had raised $1 million to fund the brand's innovation pipeline for entering into more categories with safer & healthier products for babies & mother starting with the launch of ‘Traditional Recipes’ by Mamaearth a range of wellness solutions for mothers including herb teas & supplements.

BabyChakra competes with other similar platforms including Tinystep, Parenttune, Parentlane, Zen Parent and Babygogo. Flipkart-backed Tinystep raised $2 million in funding early last year.

The parenting market in India is pegged at $30-billion and several app based startups are coming up to provide a platform to new parents seeking guidance on pre and post pregnancy phases.

Source - LiveMint, Economic Times

[Top Featured Image ~ Times of India]

WittyFeed Secures Pre-Series A Funding From Anand Chandrasekaran, Apurva Chamaria, Others

Viral content marketing platform, WittyFeed has raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a Pre-Series-A round. The investment is led by independent and seasoned investors like Anand Chandrasekaran (Former Snapdeal/ Bharti Airtel CPO), Apurva Chamaria (VP & Head Corporate Marketing, HCL Technologies), Ritesh Malik (Co-Founder, Innov8), along with a group of other marquee investors.

Other investors who have joined hands in this round are seasoned entrepreneurs and professionals. The name includes Ashish Toshniwal (Y Media Labs, CEO), Ajeet Khurana (Angel Investor),  Aneil Mahajan (Ex COO, Bhaskar Group), Piyush Goel (Beyond Key Systems Pvt. Ltd., Founder & CEO), Singapore Angel Network, and Harsh Mani Tripathi (Pyoopil Education Technologies, Founder and CEO).

The company plans to use the proceedings from the funding to strengthen its technology infrastructure, enhance its distribution platform, as well as towards augmenting its product portfolio. This funding will also be used for the expansion of its sales team to dive deep into the content-driven platforms and video making for brands while exploring other domains for which WittyFeed has developed marketing platforms.

Talking about his investment, Apurva Chamaria, VP & Head of Corporate Marketing, HCL Technologies said “We're presently in the midst of a major shift in which, increasingly, people are cord cutting and entertainment and news is being distributed on social networks and consumed on mobile devices. I believe WittyFeed will benefit from this paradigm shift and emerge as a leading media company of the 21rst century. Most brands need help in thinking and executing like a publisher and WittyFeed has emerged as the trusted partner in helping brands chart this journey. I have been witnessing WittyFeed grow from strength to strength in a very quick time by mastering content creation and viral distribution. I see a brilliant future for them."

Chamaria further added, “According to a Group M report released in February, advertising spent on digital media channels is expected to grow 30% to Rs 9,490 crore in 2017. With advertising spends shifting more and more to social & digital mediums, especially towards content & videos, WittyFeed is uniquely placed to attain huge interest from brands and their custodians.”

Chamaria has emerged as one of the top angel investors in the past 2 years has invested in approximately 27 companies in this span of time. Some of his investments include Innov8, Simulanis VR, Lucideus Tech, Chqbook, Ahhaa, etc.

WittyFeed was founded in September 2014 by Vinay Singhal, Shashank Vaishnav and Parveen Singhal from a small hostel room in Chennai. Headquartered at Indore, Madhya Pradesh, WittyFeed has reached from 0 to 250 million page views per month in a short span of 3 years. It has an audience reach of more than One Billion and gets 80 million unique readers and 160 million video views every month.

“WittyFeed is on path to become the world’s largest viral content marketing platform  where brands share their stories with their consumers and the distribution is taken care of by WittyFeed’s AI driven platform. We are delighted to receive great mentorship from Anand Chandrasekaran and other individual investors as investors, mentors, and advisors,” said Vinay Singhal, CEO & Co-founder, WittyFeed.

The startup is looking to expand further in the US market as it contributes 30% of company’s traffic. Some of the brands which have taken help of WittyFeed's viral capabilities are Zee Network, Tinder, Panasonic, Havmore Icecreams, ITM University, Hyundai, Coke, JIO, Dainik Bhsakar, V Resorts, Burger King, Dunkin Donuts, Droom, Lakeland, Exide life insurance, Career Launcher and 50 more.

"We are elated on getting acknowledged by some of the best entrepreneurs in the country, who have showed tremendous belief in our business model. We are really excited to welcome on board these able leaders who share the same vision as ours and can add great value to our company.” said Vinay.

WittyFeed is also an independent creator of virally successful content across 18 categories including travel, inspiration, relationships, health & fitness, food and celebrities.

Former Snapdeal Chief Product Officer Anand Chandrasekaran Invests in LetsVenture

Anand Chandrasekaran, who is currently driving Platform & Product Partnerships at Facebook, invests an undisclosed amount in LetsVenture, India's largest fundraising platform for startups. Anand, who has also been the CPO at Airtel & Snapdeal before this, brings in tremendous experience in understanding how to build platforms that become the backbone for creating large networks, with the ability to interconnect other industry players.

He has made over 35 investments in Consumer internet, B2c and p2p Marketplaces, Fintech and SaaS on LetsVenture. Anand's portfolio of startups too reflects this affinity to building platforms, be it Innov8, Aisle or Makkajai, he has invested in startups that have the potential to bring together disparate communities of people together towards a common vision. Snapdeal, Netmeds, Nobroker and Wooplr are in the top 100 startups in India as per Yourstory.

Anand is usually one of the earliest investors in in the company and has already made 5 investments in 2017. Needless to say, his investments also serve as a form of validation to the path that these startups have embarked on.

“LetsVenture is India’s largest marketplace for startup funding and our objective is to maintain this position. Anand brings extensive experience and expertise on online marketplaces. Anand's entrepreneurial journey helps him lend experience and share his own learnings with entrepreneurs. He is an active angel investor and works closely with his portfolio companies, opening up new opportunities and doors. Anand’s association with LetsVenture will help us increase our investor base in the US and build presence there,“ said Shanti Mohan, Founder & CEO, LetsVenture.

Anand will be part of LetsIgnite 2017, one of India's largest angel-investor focused conference, that is being held on 16-17 March 2017 at the Sheraton Grand in Bengaluru. The overarching theme for this year is ‘Building an ecosystem that is conducive for Exits’ which is a burning need as we mature as an ecosystem. Anand will be a panelist for the ‘Angel primer 2.0’ session along with Anupam Mittal of People Group. The session will focus on ‘how to select startups for exits’.

Customer Engagement Platform for B2C Companies, MoEngage, Bags Funding from Anand Chandrasekaran

In a major announcement, state-of-the-art user analytics and engagement platform, MoEngage, today announced an undisclosed investment from Anand Chandrasekaran, the Head of Platform & Product Partnerships for Messenger at Facebook. MoEngage has also welcomed Anand, veteran techie and product expert, on board its advisory panel. He has previously worked as Chief Product Officer, at both Snapdeal and Bharti Airtel- two organisations that are also currently customers of MoEngage. With Anand now a part of its advisory board, MoEngage will be looking to leverage his critical insights on the entrepreneurial ecosystem as well as his in-depth knowledge of the mobile growth platform needed for B2C companies, to further revolutionise digital marketing.

A doyenne in the field of technology and tech-based products, Anand has held leadership positions in several leading global companies in addition to Facebook, Snapdeal and Bharti Airtel. He was the Senior Director for Search and Mobile Products at Yahoo, and the Director of Product Management at Openwave Systems. He has also been deeply involved with the entrepreneurial ecosystem, both as an active angel investor and as an entrepreneur. Aeroprise Inc., the world’s most-deployed mobility solution for IT service management, was co-founded by Anand and later acquired by BMC Software. He also has over 30 investments across sectors such as consumer internet, marketplaces, fintech, SaaS, and hardware.

Speaking on the announcement, Raviteja Dodda, CEO, MoEngage, said, “We are delighted to secure funding from an investor as prominent as Anand Chandrasekaran, and to welcome him as a member of our advisory board. Anand has a proven track record of excelling in dynamic markets and building products that serve customers globally. As a growth platform to engage users across all channels on a 1:1 basis, Anand’s keen insights and domain expertise in growing consumer internet companies will be invaluable to our endeavours.”

Anand holds an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and a B.S. in Communications Engineering from PSG College of Technology, India. He has also been named as a ‘Young Global Leader’ by the World Economic Forum in 2010, and has been featured by Fortune on the '40 under 40' list of influential business leaders in 2016.

Anand Chandrasekaran said, “MoEngage shows immense potential for growth, and has consistently proven itself to be a pioneering user engagement platform. I am also delighted to join the advisory board at a time when MoEngage has launched a path-breaking product like Sherpa, which gathers real-time insights from user actions across apps & websites, and automates the marketing communication with predictive analytics, reducing manual intervention from marketers.”

MoEngage’s disruptive technology solutions are backed by VC investors Helion Venture Partners and Exfinity Ventures as well as Alchemist Accelerator and angels such as Kunal Bahl, Rohit Bansal, and Raghunandan G. The organisation’s ground-breaking automation strategies for user engagement have earned it a mention in the recent Forrester report titled ‘Vendor Landscape: Mobile Engagement Automation Solutions’. The platform currently analyses 15 billion+ events, delivers more than five billion personalised interactions every month through multiple engagement channels, and will be launching more innovative products in the near future.

Angel Investor and Entrepreneurial Product Leader Anand Chandrasekaran Invests in NoBroker.com

NoBroker.com has announced that Angel Investor and Entrepreneurial Product Leader, Anand Chandrasekaran has invested in the company. The investment further strengthens NoBroker’s robust investor portfolio.

NoBroker.com had raised Series B funding in February this year. The total funding raised by NoBroker.com so far is $13 million. The company’s portfolio of investors includes SAIF Partners, BEENEXT- Singapore-based venture capital firm run by Teruhide Sato, Digital Garage (early investor in Twitter), BEENOS, Qualgro and Mr. Mamoru Taniya of Asuka holdings.

Speaking on his investment, Mr Anand Chandrasekaran says, “NoBroker.com is disrupting an age old real estate industry. The business model is hugely scalable and the product reach has global potential. Innovative products driven by technology have removed intermediation in majority of sectors and it is happening in real estate as well. I am excited to guide their vision at a global level.”

Since raising the series-A round, NoBroker has grown 20 times across all key dimensions: website visitors, registered users and new property listings. “Since inception, our focus has been on building a disruptive product and enhancing customer experience. Our product philosophy is driven by innovation and fulfillment of customers’ stated and unstated needs. We are excited to have Anand as an investor. His expertise in building products of global standards will help us take our disruption to the next level”, says Akhil Gupta, CTO and Co-Founder, NoBroker.com.

NoBroker.com has served over a million customers making it the world’s largest C2C real estate platform. The firm is adding 1 lakh customers on a monthly basis and witnessing 5 lakh customer connections every month which leads to a saving of more than 18 crorers. NoBroker.com recently moved to a freemium subscription-fee based model. “There is a huge customer demand and acceptance of a brokerage-free real estate marketplace. Our focus is on building a profitable business by breaking-even next year”, says Amit Kumar Agarwal, CEO and Co-Founder, NoBroker.com.

The market size of residential rental and resale brokerage alone in top 20 cities in India is a whopping $6.5 bn which is estimated to grow to $17 bn in next 5 years. The problem that NoBroker.com is trying to solve has massive scale and impact. It is set to disrupt, redefine and democratize the real estate sector for the benefit of the customer. Before NoBroker.com, a typical rental transaction would cost 2 months brokerage and a resale transaction used to cost buyers & sellers a combined 4 to 6 per cent of the deal value as brokerage. NoBroker.com has managed to crash this transaction cost and put the savings back in customer’s pocket.

NoBroker.com is a brokerage-free real estate portal that connects customers directly with each other by eliminating the middleman. NoBroker.com is disrupting the real estate sector by removing the information asymmetry with the use of cutting edge technology and innovation. It was founded by Akhil Gupta from IIT- Bombay, Amit Kumar Agarwal from IIT- Kanpur and IIM- Ahmedabad andSaurabh Garg from IIT- Bombay and IIM- Ahmedabad.

makkajai Raises $250k Via Letsventure and from Renowned Angels

makkajai is combining engaging edu-games and learning analytics to create an adaptive learning platform. This will enable a personalized learning experience for kids, granular skill-level and real-time reporting for parents and teachers; all leading to improved learning outcomes.

The Company was founded in July 2014 (although it was conceptualised mid 2013). It has raised $250,000 in funding on Letsventure and from renowned angels. The funds invested will primarily be utilized to - Bolster the tech team and the game design team to roll-out more educational games in the next 12 months; and Ramp up the marketing team and the efforts to grow multifold in terms of customers and revenues over the next 12 months.

They have launched three games so far. Their first math game – Monster Math Classic was launched in Nov 2014 and followed it up with 2 more math games – Monster Math and Monster Math Duels (multiplayer) in Dec 2015.

Across all the games, makkajai have over 1.5 Million Downloads, all of which are organic and their solution is used across 500+ schools in the US. Their Monthly Active Users are >100,000 and they have grown consistently at a rate of 25 – 30% month-on-month purely organically, without any expenditure on customer acquisition.

The company's games are being used by hundreds of thousands of parents and 500+ schools across the US, UK, Australia, Canada and Germany – with a major India push planned in the coming months given our recent Android launch.

Their funding round involves prominent investors such as Ananth Narayanan - CEO, Myntra, Anand Chandrasekaran - Former Chief Product Officer, Snapdeal, Mekin Maheshwari - Former Chief People Officer, Flipkart, , Ravi Garikipati - Head of Engineering, Flipkart, Divyesh Shah - CEO, Indiabulls Ventures, Swastika Company Limited - Active early stage investor in India and Africa. The round was syndicated on the LetsVenture platform.

makkajai is founded by Roopesh Shenoy (CEO), Vinayak Palankar (Chief Mktg. Officer), Deep Shah (CTO) and Abhishek Awadhani (Chief Business Officer); a combination of ISB graduates and ex-education entrepreneurs.

Speaking on the fundraise, Roopesh Shenoy: Co-Founder and CEO of the company says, “Glad and humbled with all the backing we have received. My entire team has done amazing work to get us till here. It's now time to put our heads down and continue delivering on our promise - transform our customers' lives and translate that into a healthy, fast growing business.”

Roopesh Shenoy adds, “We are creating a platform with edu-games as the content and reporting features – thereby we compete with most education content companies. Our key differentiators are: Most education companies which say that they target kids still design products for the schools and the teachers; we develop products with the kids at the center of our universe.

We are one of the only education gaming company that uses a ‘design thinking approach’ in building education games. We uniquely and seamlessly combine great game design with sound pedagogy, to significantly impact learning outcomes (students who have used Monster Math have reported becoming twice as fast at Math facts in 2 weeks of playing the game).

We are one of the few companies to think of this on a global scale – whereas most companies are looking only at the US / developed markets.”

Speaking about the funding, Ananth Narayanan, CEO Myntra says, “I believe that education through games will be a vast space. The founding team is impressive and their passion for the space comes through.”

Vaibhav Jain, MD of Swastika Company Limited, an active early stage investor in India and Africa, adds “makkajai is in a segment which is unique and has infinite possibilities to explore. They have an excellent team who have a proven record of planning and execution of what customers demand.”

Abhishek Awadhani, speaking about the funding adds - “With the current fundraise, we are running several experiments – both on the content and distribution side. Through these experiments, we are confident that we will scale our user and revenue growth to 10x our current levels. There is a big push planned in both US and India; and with the backing and advise of our investors and customers, we are confident of building a product and distribution model that has never been seen before in the ed-tech space.”