Interior Design Automation Platform Prolance Raises $2 Mn in Funding Led by Foundamental and Axilor

Prolance Raises US$ 2 Million in Pre-Series A Round, Led By Foundamental and Axilor

Aims to partner with over 30,000 interior designers within the next year

Prolance, a technology-enabled cloud manufacturing platform for Interior design companies, today announced that it has raised US$2 Million (₹16 Crore) in a Pre-Series A round led by Foundamental and Axilor. Arali Ventures and Force Ventures also participated in the round. The startup said it will use the funds for expansion into more cities across India and to add new categories to its platform, with a mission to make the interior design project execution simple, accurate, and effortless.

Prolance Founders

Prolance offers a Design-to-Manufacturing SaaS platform that automates all the activities from quote to CNC file generation for manufacturing. It also provides a marketplace for procurement of all materials required for the execution of interior projects and cloud manufacturing of the projects.

Rama Harinath K, Cofounder, and CEO of Prolance said, “Prolance started with the mission to transform the interior design industry through technology, and our goal is to become the Operating System for the Interior industry. Our growth in the last two years, along with near-universal appreciation from our clients is a testament to the strengths of our SaaS-based marketplace for interior design professionals. We are really excited to have the backing of leading global and Indian investors in this round as we gear up to execute the next stage of our growth strategy and bring Prolance to thousands of interior design companies and contractors.”

Prolance already works with some of the biggest names in the residential interiors ecosystem, including Godrej Interio, SquareYards, Landmark, Pepperfry, and NoBroker. The startup also has more than 1000 smaller interior firms using its platform. The startup also has enlisted hundreds of materials suppliers and processing factories on the supply side to become a single-stop shop for materials and manufacturing. Headquartered in Bangalore, Prolance also has a strong presence in Hyderabad and Chennai.

The startup was founded in 2020 by five industry veterans: Rama Harinath K (Co-founder of HomeLane and MyHomeSpeaks), Vivek Parasuram (Cofounder of HomeLane.com and Bello Interiors), Raghunath Gururajan, Jaisimha Sathyanarayana, and Manoj K (all three are co-founders of DeltaCADD solutions).

Shubhankar Bhattacharya, General Partner of Foundamental said, “Manufacture of, and procurement for, interior design products represent a large market that is starved of technology enablement. Rama, Vivek, Raghunath, Jaisimha, and Manoj are seasoned founders with a strong founder-market fit to tackle this immense opportunity. We are thrilled to lead Prolance's seed round as they continue on their journey to becoming the leading manufacturing platform for interior products in India and beyond.”

Nandan Venkatachalam, Principal, and B2B Lead at Axilor said, “Prolance is looking to automate the fragmented and highly complex $ 60 billion interior design market in India. The team comes in with in-depth experience in the space, which gives them a unique advantage on a product, distribution, and value addition to customers through their cloud manufacturing platform. We are glad to be backing their vision, in our continued theme to back companies going after large, unorganized supply chains.

Prolance said that it has added hundreds of partners in the last year including major players like Square Yards, Pepperfry, Landmark, and NoBroker. The startup is now aiming to add 30,000 partners over the next 12 months. It also plans to add new categories like False Ceilings, wallpapers, Painting, and loose furniture among others on the platform.

Axilor Incubated Marax AI Launches Goal Based User Retention Platform with Funds from Zeroth.AI and Artesian VC

California and Bangalore-based marketing automation startup Marax AI has launched a goal based user retention and engagement platform which allows brands to retain and engage their users with personalized delightful experiences in real time; driving higher conversions and more meaningful engagements.

The platform is meant for broader set of e-commerce customers as the startup claims to have 9% reduction in churn for one of its customers, DailyNinja.

Marax is incubated at Axilor, a startup accelerator as well as early stage seed fund founded by Infosys co-founders Kris Gopalakrishnan and SD Shibulal.

Marax platform works on making user engagement more relevant and as personalized communications is becoming a key differentiator for making buying decisions, the platform by Marax focus on long-term user happiness, depending on industry.

According the startup, "Currently the market lacks a tool which optimizes for user intent and business goals simultaneously. For example - optimizing for a user’s intent to purchase a particular product with a personalized offer while also satisfying marketing budget constraints at the same time. And this is where Marax AI comes in."

[caption id="attachment_127871" width="537" align="aligncenter"] Raman Shrivastava - Founder/CEO - Marax[/caption]

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine at Marax works by monitoring millions of real-time data points of the critical moments in the user’s lifecycle and their interaction with retention and engagement campaigns to build a deep understanding of user behaviours with your product or service and then engage them through a multi-step recommendation process with the most relevant experiences at the right time through the customer’s preferred channels of communication to maximize long-term user satisfaction.

Started by Raman Shrivastava, Sumant US and Prateek Gupta in 2016, Marax is a goal based user retention and engagement platform which takes both - the company’s business objectives and customer motivations into consideration making every interaction with the brand a meaningful one.

Marax has raised an undisclosed pre-seed round from Zeroth, Artesian VC and a series of angel investors. The company is currently in talks to raise another round of funding and they will use the new funds to strengthen their ML and AI offerings, expand their team and expand aggressively across international markets.

To ensure that brands only send the most personally relevant notifications to users, notifications are matched to users using machine learning models in a multi-step process. Traditionally, supervised learning models have been used for predicting click through rate (CTR) and likelihood that the notifications lead to meaningful interactions.

This however, doesn’t capture the long term or incremental value of sending notifications. There can be some signals that appear long after and cannot be attributed directly to the notification.

Supervised learning systems typically generate predictions, but then require data analysts and product managers to make sense of these predictions and craft a strategy to take actions.

Marax’s feedback driven learning systems, on other hand, can create systems that make decisions, take actions and improve based on the feedback they receive. With these implicit feedback driven systems, they have observed a significant improvement in overall long-term reward.

This approach also moves away from the traditional methods of rule based and event based triggered retention marketing campaigns optimized for immediate rewards such as a higher CTR, delivering results visible in the form of reduced churn rates, higher retention and better engagement metrics for brands.

The team currently consists of AI researchers, Data Scientists and software developers working in tandem with marketers and industry veterans, reminiscent of scenes from Mr. Robot.

Raman Shrivastava, CEO of Marax puts it, “We are building our way to the end of segmentation. Every customer is unique and they should be treated that way. We make this possible with automated and optimized actions delivery moving beyond just predictions while also taking into consideration, business constraints"

The company is currently running trials with their existing set of early adopters within the consumer internet space to gather feedback and refine their algorithms while also adding more integrations with the third party tools that their clients work with.

“Thanks to Marax, in just one one month of working together, we boosted user engagement and have been able to reduce our monthly churn rate by 9% ” Sushant- Product Manager at DailyNinja , Sequoia funded startup and one of Marax’s early adopters.

“Raman and the Marax team are one of the top customer and product-focused teams we have seen. Their customers love them because they take feedback well, treat those relationships sacred, and their success shows for it.” - Tak Lo, Partner, Zeroth.AI and one of Marax’s early investors.

“Kudos to Raman and team at Marax at having identified a potent technology in form of deep learning for user analytics, primarily retention. The use of deep learning combined with unique domain driven data strategy gives them better accuracy over conventional models.” - Dr.Srinivas Padmanabhuni, PhD. in Artificial Intelligence from University of Alberta, who advises Marax on their AI strategy and architecture.

Events and Activities Marketplace Events High Raises Its First Round of Funding from Axilor

Bengaluru-based Events High, an events and activities marketplace has raised its first round of funding from Axilor. Having crossed 500,000 monthly unique visitors this month, Events High is a sought after market place for local events and activities. Launched in 2014, the company will use the funding to expand its organiser base and customise user experience on its platform.

Events, today, are an extension of one’s personality and preferences. They are much more than networking platforms. Consumers are looking for events where they get to experience something new and organisers are working towards creating unique offerings. Through its growing events and consumer base, Events High has integrated more than 3500 organisers in Bangalore alone and is now expanding its supplier acquisition efforts in Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai. The team is also ramping up mobile presence having crossed more than 200,000 app downloads.

“Customers value engagement & unique experiences and Events High is committed to curate these experiences and make them known. We currently have 3000 verified listings per city per month with 30% of this supply directly bookable on the Events High platform. We have a large base of monthly active users that has grown by 3x over the last 6 months,” said Nikesh Garera, Cofounder and CEO of Events High. He added, “With Axilor’s backing we will deepen interest and location based targeting that will allow organisers to fill in supply gaps. I am pleased to welcome Abhishek, cofounder and head of Product who will help enhance the platform with his experience.”

Abhishek Shrivastava recently moved to India from Google Mountain View and will be heading Product at Events High. He worked with Walmart Labs prior to Google. Events High is now a team of 4 co-founders {Nikesh Garera (CEO), Arvind Batra (CTO), Parag Sarda (Head of Mobile) and Abhishek Shrivastava (Head of Product)}. Nikesh, is an alumnus from Carnegie Mellon and Johns Hopkins where he pursued his MS and Phd respectively. Arvind did his MS from Georgia Tech and he, along with Nikesh also worked at Kosmix which was later acquired and became Walmart Labs. Parag Sarda worked at Google and Walmart Labs and has an ME from Indian Institute of Science. Events High is now a team of 22 members.

Kris Gopalakrishnan, Chairman Axilor Ventures said, “The fascinating thing about event marketplaces is that these are transitioning into communities and thriving ecosystems. Events High is unique as it is more than a listing platform. Being deep tech enabled, it has the potential to change the way events are consumed by users.”

There is tremendous opportunity for online listing and booking of events in India. As per a FICCI-KPMG report around 10x of the event data in India is still unorganised/ offline. Most business happens via phone-lead models and Events High aims to change that by launching a new version of their organizer mobile app that goes well beyond managing ticket sales/leads to managing the entire workflow of the event or activity. This will also help organisers understand where the missing pieces lie.

Other players in the space include MeraEvents, BookEventz, Onspon.com and BookMyShow among others. In June 2016, Mumbai-based Onspon.com, an event-brand partnership platform, secured $150K (Rs. 1 Cr) in angel funding from Indore’s Swan Angel Network.

Emergency Response Mobile App Provider MUrgency Raises Funding From Axilor

MUrgency Inc., the world’s first emergency response mobile app provider has raised funding from Axilor. Based at Stanford ChangeLabs in Silicon Valley, MUrgency is an award winning idea that ensures help from the nearest doctor, nurse or paramedic in a medical emergency. With this investment, MUrgency Inc. is part of Axilor’s portfolio.

Shaffi Mather, Founder, MUrgency said, “We are privileged to have Axilor invest in MUrgency. To have Kris Gopalakrishnan, S D Shibulal, Srinath Batni and Prof. Tarun Khanna as investors in MUrgency through Axilor is truly an honor and recognition of the potential of MUrgency. Their confidence in our idea and product backed by proactive guidance has played an important role in our progress so far. The company will use the proceeds of the funding to develop the brand, recruit talent, augment technology and scale operations.”

S.D. Shibulal, Co-founder Axilor said, "The emergency medical response system in India and the developing world is highly fragmented. MUrgency can help improve access and bring in much needed transformation in our emergency response delivery system”

Kris and Shibulal retired from Infosys in 2014 and have been involved nurturing the next generation of entrepreneurs, launching startups and expanding the scope of their respective family philanthropic foundation.  They have been making investments through their family offices in various sectors. In October 2014, Kris and Shibulal founded Axilor along with Srinath Batni and Tarun Khanna to help early stage startups in areas like eCommerce, healthcare, life sciences, sustainability and clean technology.

Srinath Batni, Co-Founder Axilor said, “In any medical emergency the first ten minutes may mean life or death. Most of us waste these critical minutes in making multiple calls or even worse finding out which number to call. With the MUrgency app, a medical professional trained in life support reaches the patient or victim in under 10 minutes in urban areas. I believe this can transform emergency medical response globally”.

With one tap on the MUrgency app, the nearest trained and validated nurse, doctor or EMT will come to your rescue. Launched in tri-city area (Chandigarh, Mohali, Panchkula) in Punjab, India in February this year, MUrgency has developed a responder network of 36 hospital emergency rooms, 40+ ambulances and 350+ medical professionals.

MUrgency has been making waves in the Silicon Valley and tech venture space globally gaining recognition in several technology venture competitions.

"Our vision is to make emergency response available to anyone, anytime, anywhere, with just one tap on a mobile phone, across the world, by 2020. We will cover Punjab fully before 30 June, 2016 and be pan India by 2018,” said Sweta Mangal, Director, Global Emergency Response, MUrgency Inc.

Emergency Response Mobile App Provider MUrgency Raises Funding From Axilor

MUrgency Inc., the world’s first emergency response mobile app provider has raised funding from Axilor. Based at Stanford ChangeLabs in Silicon Valley, MUrgency is an award winning idea that ensures help from the nearest doctor, nurse or paramedic in a medical emergency. With this investment, MUrgency Inc. is part of Axilor’s portfolio.

Shaffi Mather, Founder, MUrgency said, “We are privileged to have Axilor invest in MUrgency. To have Kris Gopalakrishnan, S D Shibulal, Srinath Batni and Prof. Tarun Khanna as investors in MUrgency through Axilor is truly an honor and recognition of the potential of MUrgency. Their confidence in our idea and product backed by proactive guidance has played an important role in our progress so far. The company will use the proceeds of the funding to develop the brand, recruit talent, augment technology and scale operations.”

S.D. Shibulal, Co-founder Axilor said, "The emergency medical response system in India and the developing world is highly fragmented. MUrgency can help improve access and bring in much needed transformation in our emergency response delivery system”

Kris and Shibulal retired from Infosys in 2014 and have been involved nurturing the next generation of entrepreneurs, launching startups and expanding the scope of their respective family philanthropic foundation.  They have been making investments through their family offices in various sectors. In October 2014, Kris and Shibulal founded Axilor along with Srinath Batni and Tarun Khanna to help early stage startups in areas like eCommerce, healthcare, life sciences, sustainability and clean technology.

Srinath Batni, Co-Founder Axilor said, “In any medical emergency the first ten minutes may mean life or death. Most of us waste these critical minutes in making multiple calls or even worse finding out which number to call. With the MUrgency app, a medical professional trained in life support reaches the patient or victim in under 10 minutes in urban areas. I believe this can transform emergency medical response globally”.

With one tap on the MUrgency app, the nearest trained and validated nurse, doctor or EMT will come to your rescue. Launched in tri-city area (Chandigarh, Mohali, Panchkula) in Punjab, India in February this year, MUrgency has developed a responder network of 36 hospital emergency rooms, 40+ ambulances and 350+ medical professionals.

MUrgency has been making waves in the Silicon Valley and tech venture space globally gaining recognition in several technology venture competitions.

"Our vision is to make emergency response available to anyone, anytime, anywhere, with just one tap on a mobile phone, across the world, by 2020. We will cover Punjab fully before 30 June, 2016 and be pan India by 2018,” said Sweta Mangal, Director, Global Emergency Response, MUrgency Inc.