IISc-based Startup Bellatrix Aerospace Raises $3 Mn to build Re-Usable Space Launch Vehicles

Bangalore-based Bellatrix Aerospace, a new Space company specializing in In-space propulsion systems & orbital launch vehicles, has raised $3 million in pre-Series A round of funding led by group of venture capital investors that include IDFC-Parampara, StartupXseed, Karsemven Fund and Survam Partners.

GrowX Ventures and bollywood actress Deepika Padukone, through KA Enterprises also contributed in the round. Incubators -- CIIE of IIM Ahmedabad and IIT Bombay's SINE also participated.

Bellatrix will use the raised capital in increasing the team size, which currently consists of 14 people. The startup first raised funding from all Indian investors but now its reaching out globally for its next round.

Formed in 2015, by Yashas Karanam and Rohan M Ganapathy, Bellatrix is based out of Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore's Entrepreneurship center Society for Innovation and Development (SID), and is developing key technologies in electric propulsion, new generation propellants and launch vehicles. With its dedicated Launch Vehicles for Nano-Satellites and In-Space Propulsion Systems, the startup aims to offer affordable access to Space.

The young space tech startup is said to be developing two product lines with the aim of making space travel greener and more affordable. It has two launch rockets in the pipeline, with both models having re-usable features that can reduce the cost of space travel.

Building propulsion systems for all sizes of satellites, Bellatrix's first product is an electric propulsion system that runs on water

The startup is also making satellite propulsion systems, using a frontier technology that employs water as a propellant while heating it with microwave-induced plasma. One of its two-stage launch rocket, Chetak, is planned for 2023 launch.

Chetak is a two stage, all-carbon composite constructed vehicle that use liquid methane as fuel and the first stage is designed for reuse.

Notably, Bellatrix counts Dr. M.R. Srinivasan among its advisory, who is a recipient of Padma Vibhushan award for his immense contributions to nuclear science and technology. Dr Srinivasan retired as Chairman of Atomic Energy Commission and Secretary Department of Atomic Energy in 1990 as one of the towering personalities who ably guided Indian Nuclear Programme.

Cyber Security Startup CloudSEK Raises Fresh Funding from IDFC-Parampara

Artificial Intelligence based Digital Risk Management and cybersecurity platform provider CloudSEK has raised further funding from IDFC Parampara. Founded in 2015 by renowned cyber security expert Rahul Sasi, the company had raised  2.5 M USD in pre-series A till date.

Currently it has investors like Exfinity Ventures, former Infosys board member V Balakrishnan, StartupXseed Ventures (who recently exited their Cyber-security investment, ShieldSquare), ME Meeran trust.

CloudSEK will leverage the freshly raised funds to evolve its product Xvigil. Furthermore, it will also use the funds to expand its footprints in India and South East Asia. After establishing itself as a preferred cybersecurity solution in the financial, e-commerce and transportation sector, CloudSEK now plans to target the pharmaceuticals, petrochemicals and retail industry. Axis Bank, Federal Bank, NPCI, OLAM,  L&T, Go-Jek, HDFC Bank, Bank Bazaar are in CloudSEK’s client list.

CloudSEK is the brainchild of Rahul Sasi and was founded in 2015 with its headquarter in Singapore and an operational center in Bengaluru, India. The Brand offers cybersecurity platform powered by machine learning and promises to build a risk-free digital security ecosystem. It has been helping organizations by providing them timely, specific and actionable intelligence, thereby preventing digital security infractions. The start-up promises to build a risk-free cyber security ecosystem in Asia. The exclusive gamut of cyber security tools offered by CloudSEK is all set to make India ready for what is being assumed to be the next phase of the digital revolution. The client tail includes leading banks, e-commerce and technology organizations in its clientele. Federal Bank, Go-Jek, Bank Bazaar, HDFC Bank and Grab Taxi are in CloudSEK’s client list, five of which are unicorns.

“Cloudsek has developed a much needed product to scan and monitor the dark web, deep web and surface web threats. They provide actionable intelligence leveraging their AI/ML based deep technology and domain expertise, that helps protect the digital assets of any enterprise, including the infrastructure. This fits in very well with IDFC-Parampara’s fund theme of technology IP/innovation based investments.” said Jatin Desai, General Partner of IDFC-Parampara Fund.

CloudSEK’s founder Rahul Sasi and CEO Sourabh Issar spoke about the funding, and the company’s plans going forward:

With the increasing awareness about CyberSecurity, we are seeing urgency in the demand, which has translated into us doubling our revenues in the last 4 months. This vote of confidence from IDFC Parampara is a welcome validation of this momentum and acceleration that we have been witnessing – said CloudSEK CEO, Sourabh Issar.

CloudSEK offers cybersecurity platform powered by machine learning and promises to build a risk-free digital security ecosystem. X-Vigil, CloudSEK’s SaaS-based flagship product is an outcome of the company’s 4 years of diligent research and development efforts.

Automated Marketing Platform Verloop Raises $3 Mn from from IDFC Parampara, Kris Gopalakrishnan and Ranjan Pai

Philadelphia and Bangalore-based Verloop, a customer support and engagement automation platform, has announced the closing of a $3 million in Series A round of funding led by IDFC Parampara Fund, an early stage startup fund jointly established by IDFC group and venture capital firm Parampara Capital.

The round also saw the participation from Kris Gopalakrishnan - Infosys Co-founder and Dr Ranjan Pai - Chairman of the Manipal Education and Medical Group (MEMG).

Earlier in November 2016, Verloop had raised undisclosed amount in seed funding from Growth Story, Anand Chandrasekaran, Mohandas Pai and Suresh Vaswani - President of Dell Services, and Kris Gopalakrishnan.

The startup will use the capital raised in enhancing its customer engagement platform as the startup expands its team and scales operations to address the global market for automated customer services and marketing that MetricNet estimates is valued at US$19 billion annually.

Founded in 2016 by Gaurav Singh, Verloop claims to be the world's smartest conversational marketing and sales platform, which is powered by its own machine learning algorithms developed in-house especially the algorithms in NLP, NLU and pattern matching has. The platfor has Verloop bot and allows to automate FAQs, build automated flows, capture leads and schedule meetings 24x7.

“Our conversational automation platform already works with more than 5000 clients across eCommerce, Healthcare, Education, Entertainment & Lifestyle sectors across 37 countries," said Gaurav Singh, the 28-year old Founder & CEO of Verloop.

"This investment is a striking endorsement from some of the savviest and most well-known names in start-up and tech ecosystem and comes at a time when we are continuing to hire top talent and build further traction for the business", he said.

Prior to starting Verloop, Gaurav had earlier founded GoDeliver, an on-demand delivery startup, acquired by its larger competitor MagicTiger in July 2015. Prior to this, he has worked at Vizury, a growth marketing platform, now re-branded as Lemnisk.

Jatin Desai, General Partner at IDFC-Parampara, "People are seeking out a conversational experience with brands and Verloop helps organizations do this at scale. Over the last several months we’ve undertaken an intricate assessment of the Verloop platform, its architecture and the product roadmap. We were very impressed at the way the team has built Verloop and are delighted to partner with Gaurav and his team. The use-cases they’ve built are very interesting and there is great potential for the product to verticalize and mine the potential for automated customer engagement across industries, across countries and across languages."

“There have been a few notable success stories of Saas-based ventures from India and we believe Verloop certainly has the credentials to emerge a leader in the Conversational AI market that is currently led by players such as Drift and Intercom, globally,” he added.

Kris Gopalakrishnan, Co-Founder, Infosys, said, "We are seeing a massive behavioural shift with people demanding personalized and conversational brand experiences. Large, growing organizations and celebrity brands will be hard pressed to meet this requirement profitably and at-scale as interactions run into multiple millions. This is where ML (machine learning) technology coupled with human ingenuity comes in and can help harvest the potential in these interactions. Verloop has built an easily scalable model to target a huge addressable market.”

More than 120 million unique conversations have been processed since Verloop launched operations in late 2016. Verloop use-cases span Marketing & Sales (Lead Gen qualification, conversational campaigns, upsell and cross-sell etc), Customer Support (automated helpdesk, personalized onboarding of customers etc) and Celebrity Brand Management (persona management, engaging with fans, pre- and post- launch etc).

Clients who have leveraged the Verloop platform include Nykaa, Qtrove, Pipa Bella, Portea, Apollo Munich Health Insurance, and Aadhaar Bridge. The Verloop platform has also been used by some of the biggest stars in Indian entertainment including Rajinikanth for his movie Kaala. Several other mainstream and niche celebrities, publication houses and entertainment magazines are utilising conversational automation to connect with fans and readers.

Verloop.io is a language-agnostic platform that already supports 7 Indian languages including Hindi, English, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali and Hinglish. In addition, the company has developed a new messaging protocol and a patent-pending technology for bot to human hand-off of conversations when it detects that the conversation can be better served by a human chat rep.

Verloop was part of the Y Combinator Startup School 2017 and has made numerous machine learning contributions to MIT Machine Learning libraries, Facebook ML libraries and other open source ML libraries. The Verloop team also delivered a presentation on mixed language (Hinglish) detection and understanding at a Bertelsmann conference in Hamburg.

IDFC-Parampara is Rs 100 crore corpus fund that was launched last year by IDFC Alternatives, the private equity arm of IDFC group, and venture capital firm Parampara Capital. The fund has so far made 4 investments including Verloop. The three other investsee startups are -- Play Shifu (November 2017), Chakr Innovation (April 2018) and Entropik Technology (July 2018)

Augmented Reality Startup Play Shifu Raises Funding In A Round Led By IDG Ventures

Bengaluru based augmented reality-enabled interactive educational games startup Play Shifu, has raised funding in a pre-Series A round led by IDG Ventures and IDFC-Parampara Fund. The startup however did not revealed the amount of funding raised in the round.

MobilizAR Technologies Pvt. Ltd, the parent company of Play Shifu, will use the freshly raised funds to extend its reach, globally, and to strengthen its technology and design team.

Founded in 2016 by by Stanford and IIT Kharagpur alumni Vivek Goyal and Dinesh Advani, Play Shifu is an educational startup that makes augmented-reality based games for children between the ages of two and 10 years.

“We strongly believe in technologies that bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds, specifically for early-learning. The tremendous global response for Shifu Orboot, the smart globe, has given us a major boost in the ed-tech space,” said Goyal in a statement.

The news was first reported in VCCircle.

The startup sells its AR-based games across several online and offline channels throughout India including Amazon, Flipkart, Hamleys, Babyoye to name a few. The startup most recently forayed into the US through Amazon.

Jatin Desai, general partner at IDFC-Parampara Fund, said Play Shifu was one of the very few Indian startups to have been able to commercialise augmented and virtual reality-based products successfully and sell to customers globally.

“The success of Play Shifu’s Orboot product on Kickstarter in such a short time with limited resources speaks highly of the team’s domain knowledge and market opportunity,” said IDG Ventures India Advisors director Karthik Prabhakar.

India is seeing a ramp up in augmented reality and virtual reality startup segment as just last week Kalpnik Technologies, a virtual reality-driven spiritual startup, had raised $500,000 in a seed round from a group of angels at funding and incubation platform Venture Catalysts.

Last month, another VR & AR startup GridRaster has a raised $2 million in seed funding from a group of venture capital firms, which included Exfinity Ventures, Lumia Capital, Pipeline Capital, NexStar Partners, Unshackled Ventures and Explorer Group.

Prior to this, in May, Chymera VR Inc, a virtual reality advertising platform, had secured funding from a clutch of angel investors, including People Group founder and chief executive Anupam Mittal, Airbnb’s global expansion head Varsha Rao, Google executive Surojit Chatterjee, and HHC Holdings chairman Nirav Choksi. The investment was made through the LetsVenture platform.

In March, virtual reality startup ShilpMIS Technologies had raised an undisclosed amount through IvyCamp Ventures.

Augmented Reality Startup Play Shifu Raises Funding In A Round Led By IDG Ventures

Bengaluru based augmented reality-enabled interactive educational games startup Play Shifu, has raised funding in a pre-Series A round led by IDG Ventures and IDFC-Parampara Fund. The startup however did not revealed the amount of funding raised in the round.

MobilizAR Technologies Pvt. Ltd, the parent company of Play Shifu, will use the freshly raised funds to extend its reach, globally, and to strengthen its technology and design team.

Founded in 2016 by by Stanford and IIT Kharagpur alumni Vivek Goyal and Dinesh Advani, Play Shifu is an educational startup that makes augmented-reality based games for children between the ages of two and 10 years.

“We strongly believe in technologies that bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds, specifically for early-learning. The tremendous global response for Shifu Orboot, the smart globe, has given us a major boost in the ed-tech space,” said Goyal in a statement.

The news was first reported in VCCircle.

The startup sells its AR-based games across several online and offline channels throughout India including Amazon, Flipkart, Hamleys, Babyoye to name a few. The startup most recently forayed into the US through Amazon.

Jatin Desai, general partner at IDFC-Parampara Fund, said Play Shifu was one of the very few Indian startups to have been able to commercialise augmented and virtual reality-based products successfully and sell to customers globally.

“The success of Play Shifu’s Orboot product on Kickstarter in such a short time with limited resources speaks highly of the team’s domain knowledge and market opportunity,” said IDG Ventures India Advisors director Karthik Prabhakar.

India is seeing a ramp up in augmented reality and virtual reality startup segment as just last week Kalpnik Technologies, a virtual reality-driven spiritual startup, had raised $500,000 in a seed round from a group of angels at funding and incubation platform Venture Catalysts.

Last month, another VR & AR startup GridRaster has a raised $2 million in seed funding from a group of venture capital firms, which included Exfinity Ventures, Lumia Capital, Pipeline Capital, NexStar Partners, Unshackled Ventures and Explorer Group.

Prior to this, in May, Chymera VR Inc, a virtual reality advertising platform, had secured funding from a clutch of angel investors, including People Group founder and chief executive Anupam Mittal, Airbnb’s global expansion head Varsha Rao, Google executive Surojit Chatterjee, and HHC Holdings chairman Nirav Choksi. The investment was made through the LetsVenture platform.

In March, virtual reality startup ShilpMIS Technologies had raised an undisclosed amount through IvyCamp Ventures.