Fintech Startup DPDzero Raises $3.25 Mn in Seed Round Led By Blume Ventures and IndiaQuotient

Founding Team — Ranjith Ramachandra & Ananth Shroff

The company is building fintech infrastructure to make credit accessible and affordable

Credit penetration in India is a serious problem and needs a lot of attention. Without the right infrastructure, extending credit to the unserved and underserved would remain a dream. With this vision to build a robust infrastructure, fintech startup DPDzero has announced raising $3.25 million in Seed Funding led by Blume Ventures and IndiaQuotient. Prominent banking and fintech leaders like Sunil Gulati and Nikhil Kumar have also participated in the round.

This influx of capital is intended for strategic allocation, primarily to enhance product distribution, expedite product development, and assemble a high-calibre team to achieve the company's ambitious objectives.

The duo Ananth Shroff and Ranjith Ramachandra founded DPDzero in March ‘22 with an aim to fix the root cause of delayed repayments. The startup today solves for delinquencies across all stages and has developed unique behavioural models to predict and prevent defaults. This is going to bring transformation to the risk management practices in the lending industry.

"Our journey is in its early stages, but our commitment to reshape the financial landscape is unwavering. We know lending is hard, but collection is harder. We want to solve the hardest problem first." - Ananth Shroff, CEO and Co-Founder of DPDzero, shared his vision.

In a span of 10 months, the firm has witnessed 700% growth in revenue from its AI-powered collections and debt recovery platform. It has partnered with ambitious NBFCs like Tata Capital, KreditBee, Cashe, Lazypay, Snapmint and has witnessed strong interest from top private banks.

“At 55% of GDP, India's credit penetration is far below the global average of 148%. With economic growth, credit is set to rise, further driven by initiatives like AA & OCEN. This will onboard many New To Credit (NTC) customers but there is a risk of increasing NPAs, necessitating a focus on collection. Blume’s thesis on collection tech saw us investigating this space deeply. DPDzero stood out amongst all, and the collection product that Ananth and Ranjith have built, impressed us. DPDzero has an exciting roadmap for improving the credit landscape and we’re proud to support their journey.”-Sajith Pai, Partner at Blume Ventures shares his excitement with this partnership.``

Anand Lunia, Partner at IndiaQuotient, We are big believers in DPDzero's vision to build infrastructure that enables traditional and non-traditional lenders to manage risk and collections. Ananth, Ranjith and the DPDzero team have an exciting roadmap for the future of the credit landscape in India and we're proud to support their journey. 

"With the strong tailwinds from India stack scale-up, adding the next 200M people into formal credit could be sooner than expected. Risk and collections will go through a massive innovation, and DPDzero is in the best position to take all the advantage." Nikhil Kumar, co-founder of Setu, shares his views on DPDzero’s opportunity.

Revenue is the north star and over the next 12-18 months DPDzero envisions to see significant scale in increasing quality revenues from its land and expansion strategy. The company is investing aggressively in information security and is all geared up to work with large Banks, NBFCs and ARCs.

Blitz (formerly Grow Simplee) Raises $3 Mn in Seed Funding

Same-day delivery startup for omnichannel sellers, Blitz (earlier Grow Simplee), has raised $3 million in a seed round from India Quotient, Better Capital, First Cheque, and Titan Capital.

Other investors who also participated in this round include prominent Angels — Farid Ahsan, Abhinav Jain, Rahul Dash, Kunal Shah, Prabhkirandeep Singh, and Ishendra Agarwal, among others.

The Bengaluru-based startup intends to use the freshly raised capital to enhance technology infrastructure and expand its network of dark stores.

Launched in 2021 by Gaurav Piyush, Yash Sharma and Mayank Varshney, Blitz is rebranded name of erstwhile 'Grow Simplee'. The name 'Blitz' resonates the startup's passion for speed and efficiency.

The startup provides automated solution for end to end logistics, warehouse, and immediate shipping services for ecommerce brands, enabling e-commerce brands and marketplaces to deliver their products faster to their customers.

Energy Generation Forecasting DeepTech Startup Solarad.ai Raises Undisclosed Funding from India Quotient

Solarad.ai Secures Undisclosed Amount of Funding in Seed Round to Accelerate Growth from India Quotient

The fundraise will help them in tech & product development along with market expansion and accelerating their growth journey

Solarad.ai, a pioneer in energy forecasting for solar plants and battery storage, today announced the successful closure of the seed funding round led by India Quotient. This investment will fuel the company's expansion and accelerate its growth, reinforcing the mission to deliver the world’s best energy forecasting models.

Solarad.ai Founding Team

The allocated funds will be harnessed to enhance the technology infrastructure of deep-tech models and algorithms used for energy generation forecasting. The company will also focus on the expansion of the cloud infrastructure to accommodate increased demand and ensure scalability. A significant portion will be invested towards research and development to improve the accuracy and reliability of the forecasts and grow the existing customer base. The funding will also enable Solarad.ai to expand their solution offerings across Europe and US markets and build a robust team of talented professionals in areas such as data science, engineering, and business development. Furthermore, plans will be devised and implemented to develop and automate energy scheduling and trading processes to provide additional value to our customers.

"At Solarad.ai, our vision is to create a future where energy production and consumption are managed optimally, creating a more sustainable and efficient world. Currently, we are disrupting existing NWP forcasts with our revolutionary Deep-tech M.L based models. We are excited with the new phase of development in our journey. The funding from India Quotient will have a significant impact on our operations, projects, and growth. We're poised to achieve a high margin, ensuring long-term sustainability. Moreover, this will help us accelerate our research and development initiatives, scale up our sales and marketing efforts, and develop automated energy scheduling and trading processes, bringing additional value to our customers. We look forward to the tremendous support from India Quotient and chart a new wave of transformation across the industry", said Ravi Choudhary, Co-Founder, Solarad.ai.

“Across the globe, we are witnessing a dramatic transition to renewable energy sources as a key solution to combat climate change. However, managing and predicting the generation of renewable energy, especially from solar plants and battery storage, is a complex task fraught with challenges. This is where companies like Solarad.ai become crucial. They are at the forefront of innovative solutions, using deep-tech forecasting models to optimize energy generation and trading. They are a catalyst, accelerating India’s journey towards a more sustainable and efficient energy future. Their commitment to leveraging advanced technology for creating reliable and accurate forecasting models has been exceptional. This funding will propel them to new heights, and we are excited to support them in their mission to transform the energy sector”, said Anand Lunia, Founding Partner, India Quotient. 

This funding aligns with Solarad.ai's long-term strategy to provide the necessary resources to expand into new markets, improve the product offering, reinforce data security and establish the company as a go-to solution for renewable energy companies. Moreover, Solarad.ai aims to leverage this funding to attract strategic partnerships with energy companies, energy exchanges, utility providers, or technology firms that align with the solar forecasting industry. The secured funding will also be used to attract further investments from venture capital firms or other investors interested in the clean energy sector.

About Solarad.ai:

Solarad.ai is a deep-tech company specializing in energy generation forecasting for solar plants and battery storage. Their mission is to deliver advanced forecasting solutions that address the challenges faced by renewable energy companies and envision a more sustainable and efficient energy sector. Solarad.ai was founded by Ravi Choudhary (IIT Delhi alumnus, ex-JLR), Bhramar Choudhary (IIT Bombay, ex-JLR) and Haider Abbas (IIT Delhi PhD, Solar Scientist). 

Conversational Intelligence Platform Zipteams Raises $700K in Seed Funding Led by IndiaQuotient

The funding will enable Zipteams to further strengthen their engineering and machine learning teams to accelerate product development and expand footprints across India and US

Zipteams, a leading conversational intelligence platform for inside sales and customer success teams, today announced the successful closure of $700K seed funding led by IndiaQuotient and a group of angel investors. Zipteams uses AI to make customer conversations more contextual, engaging, and fruitful by enabling sales teams to bring the right data points to their customers at the moment of need.

Sales teams today depend on CRMs for the context and data about the customers, however, today they are more constrained than enabled with the CRMs because of the manual nature of data entry in them. Zipteams will make the $145 bn CRM investments more worthy by automatically capturing customer data right at the source where the conversations are happening.

The funding will enable Zipteams to invest further in its unique concept of intelligent digital salesrooms that have the capability to harness data and bring real-time customer insights to inside sales and customer success teams in virtual meetings. The company will look to strengthen the engineering and machine learning teams to enhance product offerings and seeks to achieve significant user growth in India and the US markets within the next 12-15 months. IndiaQuotient’s experience with a vast network of successful product companies will aid Zipteams in taking strategic go-to-market decisions to achieve an exponential product-led growth journey.

Zipteams has successfully completed a 6 months beta testing of the product and witnessed rampant growth in adoption across Edutech, IT, and SaaS industries. The team is now focused on expanding the use cases for sales and customer success teams across other sectors as well. Zipteams’ intelligent meeting rooms are powered with automatic identification of next steps for sales follow-up routines, self-guided nudges for sales teams to onboard and get trained faster on the job, and a complete repository of customer meetings to keep all their context in one place.

On the announcement, Siddhartha Srivastava, Founder, Zipteams, said, “The proportion of inside vs outside sales teams is continuously growing over the past few years( 45.5% now). Infact, the inside sales teams are growing 15X faster than the outside sales team. However, in this virtual, hybrid setup, there is a considerable demand for advanced technologies to assist the teams to deliver high performance in virtual customer meetings, consistently. With Zipteams, we aim to empower inside sales and customer success teams with a platform to unlock value from the massive data that is being generated in their daily customer conversations. We are already seeing great traction for the product and are continuously growing our waitlist and user base significantly week on week.

With the seed funding, we will strengthen our product and also expand our geographical footprint across India and US. We are highly enthusiastic about the investment at this juncture of our growth and look forward to elevating and innovating our offerings. IQ’s involvement will help us to fast-forward some of the most critical projects, which otherwise would’ve taken time to manifest. IndiaQuotient believes in the future potential of “Made in India” companies and our mission to build a global AI-first SaaS product from India resonates perfectly with that thought process.”

Anand Lunia, Founding Partner, IndiaQuotient said, “We have only seen the tip of the iceberg for ‘India to rest of the world’ SaaS opportunities and IndiaQuotient will continue to back exceptional founders building in this space. Inside sales is a growing market in itself and real-time contextual intelligence will be a significant enhancement in sales conversions and digitising the sales playbook.”

Zipteams’ next product upgrades will focus on advancing their NLP language models to capture nuanced customer intents. This will enhance the organization’s ability to provide real-time revenue intelligence nudges to sales teams while they are actively interacting with their customers on a call. Akash Chatterjee, Co-founder at Zipteams, added, “I’m particularly excited about our configurable NLP layer, which is designed to analyse intent and churn out real-time insights directly on customer calls. We’re making some great strides in designing our virtual calling experience to work seamlessly with our personalised recommendations engine.”

Zipteams enables sales & customer success teams with intelligent meeting rooms to have engaging & fruitful customer conversations and store those in one place. These meeting rooms are powered with automatic identification of next steps for sales follow-up routines, self-guided nudges for sales teams to onboard and get trained faster on the job and a complete repository of customer meetings to keep all their context in one place.

Women Fashion Brand FabAlley's Parent Firm Raises ₹20.75 Cr Funding from SAIF Partners, India Quotient

High Street Essentials (HSE), the parent company of women's fashion brands FabAlley and Indya, on Saturday said it has raised Rs 20.75 crore in a fresh round of funding led by existing investors, SAIF Partners and India Quotient.

The pre-series C round involves a convertible note, which will be converted during the series C raise, a statement said.

The new round of funding has also seen participation from Abhishek Dalmia and several family offices, it added.

A convertible note is a short-term debt that converts into equity, typically in a future financing round in a startup.

The latest infusion of capital comes shortly after the company had raised Rs 8 crore in venture debt from Trifecta Capital in January this year. The company has raised over Rs 97 crore in equity funding and Rs 13 crore in venture debt.

"The new capital raised will be utilised for expanding the brands' D2C (digital to consumer) footprint with new initiatives such as a subscription-based shopping experience, and catalogue curation with AI-based recommendations based on customers' affinity and data mining," the statement said.

To address the current situation, the company has also ventured into new categories such as fashion masks, lounge-wear, and formal keyboard-up dressing options.

HSE's Indya brand has seen massive online growth internationally during the last fiscal year, which will be harnessed further by adding localised offers, currencies, and payment methods, the statement said.

Started in 2012 by Shivani Poddar and Tanvi Malik, HSE has scaled up its retail footprint in FY20 with 13 new Indya stores and five FabAlley stores, along with expanding both brands to over 400 shop-in-shops across the country.

"In the midst of this unprecedented global crisis, we are working hard to ensure that we leverage all our assets such as our nimble supply chain, data-led designing and sharp focus on customer experience so that HSE emerges as a leading fashion retail company in the industry," Poddar said.

HSE reported net revenue of Rs 90.2 crore in FY19, with a net profit of Rs 1.3 crore. PTI SR

Non-Alcoholic Beverage Startup Coolberg Raises $3.5 Mn Funding from Singapore's RB Investments and India Quotient

Mumbai based startup Coolberg which offers malt based flavored non-alcoholic beers, today announced that it has secured $3.5 million Series A round led by RB Investments (Singapore based family office) and its existing investor India Quotient. The Round also saw a participation from Ashish Goenka, Chairman of Suashish Diamonds Ltd. and a pool of Investors from Indian Angel Network. 

Coolberg operates in the premium soft beverages category and comes as a great fit for the Indian market. There is significant overlap between beer drinkers and soft drink consumers plus there are many who do not consume alcohol due to religious and cultural beliefs. In some of the developed countries, non-alcoholic beers are considered as healthier drinks as well. 

Coolberg has strengthened its distribution network and is sold across major cities in India retailing at around 12,000 outlets. Apart from traditional trade channels which includes supermarkets, restaurants, etc., Coolberg can also be found at Offices, Colleges, Airports, etc. 

“Basically, anywhere you find a Cola, we want you to be able to find a Coolberg as well” Pankaj Aswani, founder of Coolberg Beverages quoted.  “Raising this investment will help us to strengthen our distribution network and increase brand awareness” Pankaj added.

Yashika Keswani, Co-founder and COO, stated “The Indian beverage market is witnessing an interesting transformation with an increased demand for new flavors. All our variants are unique, refreshing and new to market.  Our R&D team is strong and keeps a close eye on consumer needs”. 



Madhukar Sinha, Partner at India Quotient quoted “IQ is excited to lead the Series A round at Coolberg. We are very happy with the growth in revenue as well as the buzz around the brand in the served cities”  

Coolberg was conceptualized by Pankaj Aswani and Yashika Keswani with an aim to provide innovative product to enjoy during celebrations, hang-outs, casual meetings, etc. The startup had earlier raised an undisclosed seed amount from venture capital firm India Quotient and Indian Angel Network’s (IAN’s) maiden fund.

Lendingkart Raises $30 Mn in Funding from Fullerton, Bertelsmann India and India Quotient

Financial technology firm Lendingkart Technologies on Friday said it has raised a fresh equity funding of ₹212 crore (US $30 million) led by existing investors, including Fullerton Financial Holdings Pte Ltd (FFH), Bertelsmann India Investments and India Quotient.

With this funding round, the total equity raised by Lendingkart stands at USD 143 million, a statement said. In June, Lendingkart marked one of the largest startup venture debt transactions in India when it raised ₹ 80 crore from Alteria Capital, a Mumbai-based Venture Debt fund.

"The funding will be used to expand lending bases, deepen Lendingkart Group's reach to small and underserved micro enterprises and further strengthen its technological and analytics capabilities," it added.

Credit Suisse acted as the exclusive financial advisor to Lendingkart Technologies.

"This equity will help us meet the growth opportunities we are seeing. Micro and small businesses represent a vibrant yet underserved segment of the Indian economy," Lendingkart Technologies co-founder and Managing Director Harshvardhan Lunia said.

Lendingkart Finance, the NBFC arm of Lendingkart Group, has disbursed over 60,000 loans to more than 55,000 MSMEs in 1,300 cities. PTI SR

Ola-owned Foodpanda Acquires Shut Down Foodtech Firm Holachef

Foodpanda, the Ola-owned online food ordering and delivery startup, has acquired Mumbai-based foodtech startup Holachef Hospitality Pvt. Ltd, which had shut down operations in July-August this year, for an undisclosed amount.

Foodpanda will take over Holachef’s employees and kitchen equipments. Founders of Holachef, Anil Gelra, Gaurav Srivastava and Saurabh Saxena, will join the leadership team at Foodpanda.

The acquisition however is believed to bring bring no returns to its investors of Holachef, which include InnoVen Capital, Kalaari Capital, India Quotient, SIDBI Venture Capital and Ratan Tata. Holachef raised a total of $9.6 million in funding over eight rounds since 2015. The last funding raised by Holachef was in February this year when it raised Rs.20 lakhs in Series B round.

A media report in Augst has suggested that Kalaari Capital and India Quotient had already resigned from the board of directors of HolaChef earlier this year.

HolaChef acquisition comes within two months after Mumbai-based on demand delivery firm Scootsy was acquired by food delivery firm Swiggy, which is Foodpanda's biggest rival in India besides Zomato.

Notably, Holachef is Ola’s second acquisition within a year, since it had bought Foodpanda from Germany’s Delivery Hero in December last year.

HOlaChef was founded in 2015 by Saurabh Saxena, Anil Gelra and Gaurav Srivastava. Essentially, HolaChef used to curates chefs ranging from executive chefs to amateurs and allows them creative freedom through their signature dishes. Before shutting its operation three months back, the company was managing the logistics of the food (packaging, storage & delivery).

[caption id="attachment_126758" align="aligncenter" width="620"] HolaChef Founders (L-R)- Saurabh Saxena & Anil Gelra
Image - BusinessStandard.com[/caption]

With this acquisition, Foodpanda will foray into cloud kitchens and also plans to launch its own food brand across categories. The company claims to have a network of over 1 lakh delivery partners and access to over 150 million customers.

“We aim to build India’s largest cloud kitchen network that will be a major step in further elevating the food experience for our customers,” said Pranay Jivrajka, chief executive at Foodpanda. “I am delighted to welcome the Holachef team on board and look forward to their joining us in our mission of delivering superior food experiences to a billion Indians.”

"We are delighted to join hands with Foodpanda to accelerate our mission. We are thrilled to be part of Foodpanda’s and Ola’s passionate team that is truly changing the food experience for a billion Indians,” said Saurabh Saxena, co-founder and chief executive at Holachef.

Meanwhile, an another online food delivery player, FreshMenu is reportedly in talks to raise $25-30 million from new and existing investors.

Ola-owned Foodpanda Acquires Shut Down Foodtech Firm Holachef

Foodpanda, the Ola-owned online food ordering and delivery startup, has acquired Mumbai-based foodtech startup Holachef Hospitality Pvt. Ltd, which had shut down operations in July-August this year, for an undisclosed amount.

Foodpanda will take over Holachef’s employees and kitchen equipments. Founders of Holachef, Anil Gelra, Gaurav Srivastava and Saurabh Saxena, will join the leadership team at Foodpanda.

The acquisition however is believed to bring bring no returns to its investors of Holachef, which include InnoVen Capital, Kalaari Capital, India Quotient, SIDBI Venture Capital and Ratan Tata. Holachef raised a total of $9.6 million in funding over eight rounds since 2015. The last funding raised by Holachef was in February this year when it raised Rs.20 lakhs in Series B round.

A media report in Augst has suggested that Kalaari Capital and India Quotient had already resigned from the board of directors of HolaChef earlier this year.

HolaChef acquisition comes within two months after Mumbai-based on demand delivery firm Scootsy was acquired by food delivery firm Swiggy, which is Foodpanda's biggest rival in India besides Zomato.

Notably, Holachef is Ola’s second acquisition within a year, since it had bought Foodpanda from Germany’s Delivery Hero in December last year.

HOlaChef was founded in 2015 by Saurabh Saxena, Anil Gelra and Gaurav Srivastava. Essentially, HolaChef used to curates chefs ranging from executive chefs to amateurs and allows them creative freedom through their signature dishes. Before shutting its operation three months back, the company was managing the logistics of the food (packaging, storage & delivery).

[caption id="attachment_126758" align="aligncenter" width="620"] HolaChef Founders (L-R)- Saurabh Saxena & Anil Gelra
Image - BusinessStandard.com[/caption]

With this acquisition, Foodpanda will foray into cloud kitchens and also plans to launch its own food brand across categories. The company claims to have a network of over 1 lakh delivery partners and access to over 150 million customers.

“We aim to build India’s largest cloud kitchen network that will be a major step in further elevating the food experience for our customers,” said Pranay Jivrajka, chief executive at Foodpanda. “I am delighted to welcome the Holachef team on board and look forward to their joining us in our mission of delivering superior food experiences to a billion Indians.”

"We are delighted to join hands with Foodpanda to accelerate our mission. We are thrilled to be part of Foodpanda’s and Ola’s passionate team that is truly changing the food experience for a billion Indians,” said Saurabh Saxena, co-founder and chief executive at Holachef.

Meanwhile, an another online food delivery player, FreshMenu is reportedly in talks to raise $25-30 million from new and existing investors.

India Quotient, Shunwei Capital Bets $1 Mn In Bengaluru Based Clip App

Bengaluru-based digital media video startup, Clip App has raised close to $1 million in a seed round led by India Quotient and Shunwei Capital, a China-based investment firm.

The company plans to utilize freshly infused funds to enhance it’s product features for the video only app. The startup which claims have an organic growth of over 100,000 users within three months, largely from tier-II and tier-III markets plans to focus on acquiring users over the next two to three years.

Commenting on the development, Anand Lunia, partner at India Quotient told ET, “Lot of social media companies have started and shut down in India, it’s not a space where companies see a high success ratio. Besides this, investors are also interested in seeing innovative social media companies come out of India for Indians, so there is potential in terms of funding for this space. However, since the space is competitive, staying relevant is a challenge.”

Lunia believes that this space remains competitive and challenging and soon Indian entrepreneurs will learn a way to build social networks specifically for non English speaking audience in India.

Founded in March 2017 by Nav Agarwal, Clip App is presently growing organically, as the company is focusing on enhancing the product and building upon its features before aggressively marketing Clip App.

According to the Agarwal, the app specifically caters to tier-II and III user's focuses on Hindi speaking users.

Nav Agarwal, Founder, Clip App said, “They spend over 20 minutes a day on the app. And a lot of videos that are currently on the app are the kind of videos one would find shared on WhatsApp or videos individuals take randomly, could be dance, drama, stunts.Basically, one time watch videos. These users technically represent 95% of India.”

Agarwal further said that they saw the future in video when the team noticed that over 80% of Facebook’s newsfeeds consisted of videos, Instagram made a shift to taking video more seriously and Snapchat as a video medium.

Freight Services Marketplace Comet Raises Funding from India Quotient, Rajul Garg and BlackBuck Founders

Comet, a first-of-its-kind marketplace for international freight services, has raised an undisclosed amount in a seed funding round. The investment was lead by India Quotient, the Mumbai-based early stage VC fund. Marquee investor Rajul Garg and founders of BlackBuck —Rajesh Yabaji, Chanakya Hridaya, Ramasubramaniam B and Vishwanathan— have invested in their personal capacity. Other investors include, Dubai-based Nobel House, Sunstone Capital and serial entrepreneur cum angel investor Alok Mittal.

Comet was founded in June 2016 by Chitransh Sahai, Gautam Prem Jain, Ayush Lodhi, and Mehul Katiyar--young IIT-Delhi graduates—who co-founded and sold Plat to Housing.com in June 2015. Comet is a platform for international B2B freight service providers and clients, to manage everything—from booking containers to tracking and custom clearances—all from a single dashboard. It also takes the responsibility to manage all paperwork to ensure seamless end-to-end cargo delivery internationally, through roads, sea and air. The Comet marketplace offers clients, the best rates without hidden charges for international logistics and a technology-enabled system to move, track and manage their cargo across the globe. The company has already seen considerable traction in trade heavy routes like China-to-India and India-to-UAE.

Goods worth $18.7 trillion are moved across the globe every year. Out of this, India trades goods worth $700 billion. A lot of this cargo moves through ships.

“We are creating a centralized system which can coordinate international freight service providers, transport companies, CFS’s (Container freight stations) and customs operations. The idea is to bring down the opacity in the international freight management industry and thus improve time and cost efficiencies,” Co Founder Chitransh Sahai said. “The funding will help us build the team, technology and increase market penetration,” added Sahai.

Madhukar Sinha,Co Founder and Partner, India Quotient said, “International logistics is complex and there is need of transparency in this very large fragmented market. The problem statement was clear and the founder’s ambition to solve the customer experience in international trade using technology and automation got us to back them”.

Co-founders of BlackBuck, which aggregates trucks for inter-city transport, have made a strategic investment in Comet. “We are leaders in enabling customers and operators optimize their logistics, in the road transport business of India. Associating with Comet—which provides seamless global connectivity between road, sea and air—fits perfectly with our proposition of making logistics simple, effective and reliable,” Rajesh Yabaji, Co Founder of BlackBuck, said.

Indian Language Social Platform ShareChat Raises $4M in Series A Round

ShareChat, the Indian language social platform, has closed a $4 million Series A round of funding, led by Lightspeed India Partners, and from existing investors, SAIF Partners and India Quotient. The funding round also saw participation from Venture Highway (through VH Capital). Sharechat is building the largest social content network in India with a focus on small town users and vernacular content.ShareChat is the only platform available to a large audience coming to the internet for the first time, in India.

“Our core focus is to become the most essential non-chat social app for a first-time internet user, whether it is through local language content or through infotainment services which are relevant to them.They are hunting for things to do that are utilitarian (payments, commerce, etc.) – there’s plenty of choice here from Flipkart to Ola to Justdial to PayTM. They are also hunting for ways to kill time (TV, games, books, magazines, news, music, social media, ...) Most of what is in this "kill time" category is the traditional entertainment & media industry rejigging their content for mobile consumption and distributing this one-way through aggregators or directly. Examples would be Saavn or Hotstar or InShorts or Youtube. Almost no one has created or exposed new content for the average Indian common man or woman. This is what Sharechat is doing” says Farid Ahsan, Co-founder & CEO, ShareChat.

As the name suggests, ShareChat allows users to create, discover and share content with each other much like people do on Tumblr and Instagram. Users can follow other users who are either a content creator or a friend on the platform for regular updates, much-like most other social networks. The key differentiator for ShareChat, however,is the primary action of sharing.

“Our audience is ever hungry for both consuming localised content and expressing their creativity and opinions to the right audience, something that was not very easy for them until now, even with existing social networks. We believe that the Indian user is very typical in his/her needs and this gives a local player a closeness to user problems when compared with global social networking giants like Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Snapchat. A lot of our effort goes into understanding the audience and their needs through experiments. It is a lot like returning to an earlier time of internet usage, pretty close to how we were when we came to the internet for the first time in the early 2000s.” says Ankush Sachdeva, Co-founder and CPO, who has just returned from a survey trip to Alwar villages in Rajasthan.

Dev Khare, from Lightspeed India Partners, says, “ShareChat is poised to be a big problem solver for the largely-ignored mass market of India. The audience definitely needs a product which is relevant to their mindspace and we believe ShareChat balances this need of a content+social discovery platform in the best fashion.”

ShareChat is available in 6 languages, namely, Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, Gujarati and Punjabi. Tamil and Bengali are currently in private beta and will be shortly made available for all users. The app has been downloaded 3.5 million times, with roughly 2 million active users on the platform. At a daily level, 1 million content pieces get shared per day from ShareChat.

Mayank Khanduja, from SAIF Partners, says “ShareChat is in a very unique position in the Indian market today. We’ve worked closely with this team for the last one year and the way they have leveraged technology is outstanding.”

ShareChat was started by Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Singh and Ankush Sachdeva, right after graduating from IIT-K. The fact that the founders hail from small towns has helped their cause in making their first gut impressions right. ShareChat started as a content repository app for sharing on Whatsapp, and has now evolved into a full-fledged social network.

“When we invested 2 years ago, we just had a team and an idea to build a social network for the masses. From the days of ideating in our office, the team has come a long way and has grown along with the business. We rate them as the best product team we have worked with, especially their approach of blending data with experiments." says Anand Lunia, from India Quotient, the first investor in ShareChat.

“We are excited about the product that ShareChat is building. We have always believed that a homegrown social product, built for the aam aadmi in vernacular, addresses a big opportunity in India. ” says Samir Sood, founder, Venture Highway, which is advised by Neeraj Arora, the Global Business Head of Whatsapp.

“It is always a great feeling to be backed by good investors who understand the space. But procurement of capital does not ensure success of a business, though being the lifeline considering we have a limited focus on revenue. The battle only goes uphill from here,” says Bhanu Singh, Co-founder and CTO, ShareChat.

“The fresh round of funds will be employed majorly for going deep into the vernacular ecosystem. Having multi-lingual interfaces is just not enough. We have literally just touched the surface of our target audience. These are early adopters. A lot of work is required on our part to make ShareChat a household brand, digging deep into the user base, and to bring even more interesting infotainment and utilities for our ever-expanding Indian market,” concludes Farid.

Fashion Brand FabAlley Raises $2M in Series A Round Led by India Quotient

Noida-based online fashion store FabAlley has raised $2 million in its Series A round of funding led by India Quotient with participation from its existing investors - Indian Angel Network and social entrepreneur Ranjan Sharma. The company aims to utilize the newly raised funding to expand its offline reach and scale up its product offerings. It will also be used for marketing and brand management.

Online-to-offline fashion platform, FabAlley was founded in 2012 by Shivani Poddar and Tanvi Malik. FabAlley which currently retails via Central, Future Group’s fashion chain, has about 25 live stores with Central and 45 more in the pipeline. "We will be wrapping up (expansion of our Central stores) by Jan 2017," Tanvi Malik, cofounder of FabAlley said, reported ET.

"We will be expanding to categories such as lingerie and fitness wear. We will also expand our accessories portfolio to include bags, shoes, fashion jewellery as well as grow our 2 sub brands — Curve & Indya," added Malik.

Speaking about the investment, Madhukar Sinha, partner at India Quotient said, "Eventually, to reach scale you have to be present everywhere; on your own website, marketplaces and offline stores. We believe that it will be much more capital-efficient than some of the pure offline stores or brands."

Other startups which operates in the fashion retail segment are StalkBuyLove, Findow, Voonik, Fynd, Purplle and Roposo among others. Earlier last month, StalkBuyLove raised an undisclosed amount of funding from William Bissell, Managing Director of ethnic retailer Fabindia and in the same month Findow also received an undisclosed amount of funding from Raj Singh Bhandal, Director, Next Media Works.

Language App ShareChat Bags $1.35M from SAIF Partners and India Quotient

SAIF Partners, the leading venture capital firm with over $4B under management has invested $1.35 million in ShareChat, the vernacular social network. The capital infusion is a part of ShareChat’s seed round of funding which also involved participation from existing investors, India Quotient. The company will leverage the funds raised towards ramping up its tech infrastructure to cater to its constantly growing user base and to reach out to more people across India with a variety of content formats.

Besides the validation that ShareChat has received from top institutional investors, it was also applauded for its approach when it was selected as one of the 6 startups invited for the second batch of Google Launchpad Accelerator program from India, which is a six-month mentorship program.

ShareChat has built a first-of-its-kind social networking platform for India’s vernacular language users, available in 4 Indian languages, namely Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam and Telugu which will be followed by many more. It has already crossed 1 million downloads, and at half a million monthly active users, it has been consistently growing at 10% week on week. ShareChat was started by three IIT Kanpur alumni, Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Singh and Ankush Sachdeva in 2015.

Farid Ahsan, CEO, ShareChat, said, “It’s highly motivating for us to get backed by SAIF Partners. ShareChat has started growing virally now and every new user strengthens the platform even further. It’s encouraging for us to see how our users have been responding and creating a really diverse variety in vernacular content on ShareChat. With the latest fund raise we plan to strengthen our technology to serve the increasing traffic on ShareChat and expand into more languages and content types.”

Mayank Khanduja, Principal, SAIF Partners, said, “We’re very confident about team ShareChat’s understanding of what we see as a massive market opportunity. Moreover, we feel it’s the best team for the job as the co-founders have strong technical backgrounds and a highly data driven approach. The platform is powerful enough to solve the content and the social networking needs of the growing Indian smartphone users.”

Indian Internet users living in non-metro cities find it very difficult to discover content and information, especially first-time internet users, owing to poor network connections on smartphones and the native language barrier thanks to the English-first flavour of apps. These are the gaps that ShareChat seeks to plug and with this round of funding it aims to make social networking in the vernacular accessible for a larger number of users across India.

ShareChat currently allows users to follow each other, create and find content in their preferred language, and share to chat platforms like Whatsapp. ShareChat started as a content sharing tool for Whatsapp and witnessed traction of 1 million shares a week.It has now made rapid strides towards building its full-fledged social platform. Already 5 million connections have been made on ShareChat and the rapid success of user generated content is a very exciting sign that ShareChat users were desperately looking for a platform like this.

Lendingkart Group Raises $32M in Series B Funding from BII, Darrin Capital Management and Existing Investors

Lendingkart Group, India’s leading digital lending platform for SMEs has raised Rs. 205 crores ($32M) in new financing; out of which $ 20 million was raised as equity and $ 12 million as debt. This Series B round was led by Bertelsmann India Investments (BII), with participation from Darrin Capital Management and existing investors – Mayfield India, Saama Capital and India Quotient.

With this new round of funding, the company has raised Rs. 260 crore ($41M) till date. The latest infusion of growth capital will be used by the Lendingkart Group for strengthening its data science capabilities, enhancing its technology platform as well as infrastructure for improved mobile capabilities. Lendingkart Group aims to tap into India’s huge underserved lending market by expanding its footprint further across India. Over the past two years, Lendingkart Group has arranged loans to customers in 135 cities across 22 states, witnessing a 20% month-over-month growth in loan origination.

Founded in 2014, by ex-Banker, ISB Hyderabad alumnus, Harshvardhan Lunia and ex-ISRO scientist, IIM Bangalore alumnus, Mukul Sachan, Lendingkart Group has built a technology platform to service the working capital financing needs of SMEs in India. The company has partnered with leading online marketplaces and various Industry and Trade associations to service the financing needs of both online and offline SMEs.

Harshvardhan Lunia, Co-Founder and CEO, Lendingkart Group said, “Our investors share our vision and have been instrumental in our growth journey. With Bertelsmann onboard, we look forward to leveraging its deep understanding of global financial products as well as Internet Businesses. With Financial Services leaders such as Arvato Financial Solutions as a part of the Group, Bertelsmann has strategic insights of the Fintech space with end to end process knowledge and expertise in digital origination. Bertelsmann brings a fresh perspective on digital distribution and data driven risk assessment which will help us in becoming the leading lending platform for SMEs in India.”

“Customer is at the core of what we do. We believe in providing simple, instant and flexible financing solutions to our borrowers. Using web and smartphones, customers can apply for a loan at their convenience. Our proprietary algorithms use over 2200 variables to assess the applicant’s credit worthiness. With funds being transferred in as less as 24 hours, credit on demand is becoming a reality”, said Lendingkart Group Co-Founder & COO, Mukul Sachan.

Bertelsmann Indian Investments, Managing Director, Pankaj Makkar said, “We are excited to partner with Lendingkart Group to build the next generation lending company in India and we believe lending is a large market which will see a lot of innovation. Lendingkart is a strong example of such innovation where technology and data can provide monetary access to the remote corners of India”

"Lendingkart Group has been very successful in proving that the underbanked SME space is as credit worthy as the over banked enterprise space.” Mayfield Managing Partner, Vikram Godse said.

Ash Lilani, Managing Partner, Saama Capital said, “We have been investors in Lendingkart Group since the seed round and have been extremely pleased at the pace of growth and how quickly it has established itself as the leader in B2B lending to SMEs. The fact that it is one of the few companies that leverages technology to be the true driver for its business has us very excited about the scale and efficiency as it goes to the next phase of growth.”

Avendus Capital was the exclusive financial advisor to this transaction.

Image Source: ShutterStock

Gurgaon-Based DogSpot Raises Funding From Ratan Tata and Others

Gurgaon-based PetsGlam Services Pvt. Ltd that runs online pet supplies store Dogspot on Monday said Ratan Tata, chairman emeritus of Tata Sons Ltd has invested an undisclosed amount in his personal capacity in online pet shop Dog-Spot, along with existing investor Ronnie Screwvala. Other investors in the round include Ashok Mittal, Rishi Parti, Dheeraj Jain, partner at Redcliffe Capital, a UK-based hedge fund, and Abhijeet Pai.

Early-stage investment firm India Quotient also participated in this funding round which is also an existing investor in the startup. In 2013, DogSpot raised an undisclosed amount from early-stage investment fund India Quotient.

Over the past 12 months, Tata has backed several Indian startups, including taxi-hailing app company Ola, online marketplace Snapdeal, auto portal CarDekho.com and online furniture and lifestyle retailer Urban Ladder.

"The investment by Mr Tata is an endorsement of the long-held belief by us and our investors that the Indian pet care sector is going through a phase of huge growth and transformation," said Rana Atheya, cofounder and CEO of DogSpot.

The startup plans use the money to expand its private label product range. It currently sells biscuits, treats and grooming products under its own brand and plans to further expand the portfolio by launching variants within these categories. The company has so far raised close to $1 million in multiple rounds from angel and seed investors.

Started in 2008 by Rana Atheya, Shalesh Visen and Gaurav Malik, Dogspot.in is no.1 portal in India under pet Category, according to ComScore.

Currently, the company generates almost 150 orders a day from its portal and aims to increase it three fold in the next one year. The website sells accessories, food, toys, grooming and healthcare products for dogs, cats, birds and fish.

Gurgaon-Based DogSpot Raises Funding From Ratan Tata and Others

Gurgaon-based PetsGlam Services Pvt. Ltd that runs online pet supplies store Dogspot on Monday said Ratan Tata, chairman emeritus of Tata Sons Ltd has invested an undisclosed amount in his personal capacity in online pet shop Dog-Spot, along with existing investor Ronnie Screwvala. Other investors in the round include Ashok Mittal, Rishi Parti, Dheeraj Jain, partner at Redcliffe Capital, a UK-based hedge fund, and Abhijeet Pai.

Early-stage investment firm India Quotient also participated in this funding round which is also an existing investor in the startup. In 2013, DogSpot raised an undisclosed amount from early-stage investment fund India Quotient.

Over the past 12 months, Tata has backed several Indian startups, including taxi-hailing app company Ola, online marketplace Snapdeal, auto portal CarDekho.com and online furniture and lifestyle retailer Urban Ladder.

"The investment by Mr Tata is an endorsement of the long-held belief by us and our investors that the Indian pet care sector is going through a phase of huge growth and transformation," said Rana Atheya, cofounder and CEO of DogSpot.

The startup plans use the money to expand its private label product range. It currently sells biscuits, treats and grooming products under its own brand and plans to further expand the portfolio by launching variants within these categories. The company has so far raised close to $1 million in multiple rounds from angel and seed investors.

Started in 2008 by Rana Atheya, Shalesh Visen and Gaurav Malik, Dogspot.in is no.1 portal in India under pet Category, according to ComScore.

Currently, the company generates almost 150 orders a day from its portal and aims to increase it three fold in the next one year. The website sells accessories, food, toys, grooming and healthcare products for dogs, cats, birds and fish.

Mobile Startup Momoe Raises $1.2 Mn In Funding Led By IDG & Jungle Ventures

Bangalore-based mobile payment startup Momoe has raised $.12 million in funding round led by IDG ventures and Jungle ventures, with participation from India Quotient.

The newsly raised funds will be used to expand the team as Momoe plans to reach 500 merchant outlets in the next few months.

Momoe enables people to pay on their mobile phones. Momoe is a location aware smart phone app. People can pay on Momoe with their existing credit cards & debit cards. Momoe is accepted at restaurants, coffee shops, grocery stores & apparel stores in India.

Unlike PayTM and Mobikwik, which facilitate cashless payments with a virtual wallet solution that stores a fixed amount of cash, Momoe's app works by using credit-card details which is very much similar to another Gurgaon-based mobile payment app called Ruplee with which one can pay using his credit or debit card.

Momoe was founded in 2014 by Utkarsh Biradar, Karthik Vaidyanathan, Ganesh Balakrishnan, Neelesh Bam and Aiman Ashraf who are mostly graduates of IITs and IIMs. "We are the early movers in the space," said CEO Utkarsh Biradar, 44, a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, who expects the company to handle Rs 3,000 crore worth of transactions in the next 18 months.

Momoe app currently has a user base of over 3000 customers, and has crossed Rs 1 million in transactions. They plan to expand to other urban metros in India and abroad once they get to a 100-150 restaurants in Bangalore. The startup currently has five founding members and eight employees.

Grabhouse Raises $2 million Funding Led By Kalaari Capital

India's first completely broker-free property search portal Grabhouse.com is raising $2 million (Rs.12 crore apprx.) in a Series A round of funding led by Kalaari Capital. Seed stage investor India Quotient, which had invested in Grabhouse in January and June this year, will participate in the round. GrabHouse is owned by Mumbai based Cryptopy Technologies.

Grabhouse had raised an undisclosed amount in its January seed round. The round was led by India Quotient and co-investors included Chetan Bohra and Navin Ranka, partners at Mumbai based boutique investment firm RB & Partners, and Deutsche Bank executive MV Krishnan.

In July this year, GrabHouse raised $500,000 again from its existing investor India Quotient.

GrabHouse helps people finding apartments, sharing rooms and PG's on rent without involving brokers. The infrastructure of the website ensures easy access along with multiple options for flats and flatmates. The portal claims to have listed around 90,000 properties. The portal is currently caters in 4 cities - Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune.

The portal was founded in 2013 by Prateek Shukla, a graduate from IIT Kanpur and Pankhuri Shrivastav, a Computer Science graduate and 'Tech for India' Fellow.

Grabhouse was one of the 10 companies incubated at IQ boot camp and was also selected for GSF accelerator programme.

Grabhouse along with Housing.com and Commonfloor are recent entrants in the property search portal segment in India. Recently, Housing.com had secured $19 million in funding from Helion, Nexus and Qualcomm Ventures. It is now reportedly in talks to raise a fresh $30-40 million.

Gurgaon based Events discovery app Nearify raises funds from SeedFund advisors and others

Gurgaon based Novelroots Internet Pvt. Ltd, maker of the Nearify mobile app that collates information on local events, on Monday said it has raised between $0.5 million and $1 million from Seedfund Advisors, India Quotient and Bedrock Ventures, a seed and early-stage investor.

"We will use these funds to build technology and strengthen our mobile application. We are also looking to incorporate new features such as ticketing facilities for paid events and a messaging platform that will allow users to discuss events with their friends," said Vivek Srivastava (co-founder of Nearify) in a statement to LiveMint.

Novelroots was founded in December 2012 and Nearify was launched in June 2103, founders of startups are three IIT Kanpur alumni - Mayank Kumar, Saurav Singh and Vivek Srivastava. Nearify helps you discover everything that's happening within a 50 km radius around you or anywhere else on the planet. Apart as a website, Nearify is also available as an Android and iOS app, all you have to do is launch Nearify app, let the app detect your location (you may select another location of your interest too) and then see the results load.

Additionally, you can use Nearify to find out about the various events happening in the far-off places as well, in case you are travelling and wish to plan out your itinerary.

The app uses technology to aggregate data related to events from the web, which goes through a proprietary data processing engine for quality and relevance. It then collates that events’ data into a common format for users to consume.

Nearify hosts around 10 million events from 52 cities around the world. "We get 80% of the traffic from outside India," said Vivek Srivastava, adding the company plans to open an office in the US in the next one year.

Novelroots is also working on creating an event promotion platform for organizers where they can "preferentially" list their events on Nearify for a fee.