Vehicle Maintenance Startup Hoopy Raises Funds from Lead Angels, Venture Farmer

Bangalore based vehicle maintenance startup Hoopy has raised an undisclosed amount in its recent round of funding from Lead Angels Network and Venturefarmer, a private family office making Pre-Series A to Series B investments. Hoopy is a technologically connected ecosystem for the vehicle after-sales service industry.

Founded in 2016 by Abhinav Shrivastava, Vedic Choubey both IIT Kharagpur alumni & Shashank Dubey BIIB Pune alumni, Hoopy is currently focusing on two wheelers and has completed more than 1 Lac jobs. Hoopy is operationally profitable and claims to have the least CAC in the consumer market and is the dominant market leader in Institutional business of two-wheeler fleet maintenance with clients like Bounce, Vogo, Drivezy etc.

India's premium angel network Lead Angels which provides 360° support across all stages for startups and Bangalore based family office Venture Farmer have invested in this round. Hoopy was advised by CreedCap Asia Advisors for Venture Farmer investment.

“Tech-enabled operations will be the game changer of this technology starved industry. Hoopy will use this fund in its product development, expanding the team and refinement to further improve customer service and operational efficiencies said Abhinav, CEO of Hoopy.

"Several of our investing members who are also CEOs and CIOs were impressed by the ease and speed with which the company's workflows can be deployed in their organizations and we see a tremendous opportunity ahead as the company scales up its reach worldwide” adds Sushanto Mitra, CEO, Lead Angels.

Varadarajan Seshamani, Director at ISA Impex Pvt Ltd and President of IITKGP AA adds "Hoopy is one of the rare Startups that employs the power of engineering and good management to provide for the growing demand for actual physical work to take out a major pain point for their customers, rather than just look to the power of e-commerce to generate business ideas. The result of good business research and application of mind".

The automobile service industry is huge and highly unorganized where 70% of the market share is captured by the local garages. Two-wheeler service industry in India alone stands at $6Bn today. The recent surge in the last mile connectivity of bike rentals, bike taxis, food/medicine/groceries home delivery and adaption of doorstep convenience by customers promises an exciting time ahead for Hoopy.

Lead Angels Network has a process driven investment approach and provides 360° support across all stages for investee companies. Lead Angels is a full stack services company for startups. It provides consulting and execution services for business planning, incorporation and regulatory related filings required for starting up through LA Management & Professional Services. Lead Angels Network provides early stage funding to companies which have achieved traction and looking to prove their disruptive growth hypothesis. Lead Advisory assists companies looking to raise growth capital for scaling their business.

About Venturefarmer, it invests across Agriculture & Food, Artificial Intelligence, Clean-tech, Domestic Brands, Healthcare, Media, Travel & Transportation. Venturefarmer invests in the range of $100k-$700k.

Pune-based Workflow Automation Startup Zestl Raises Funding in Pre-Series-A

Pune-headquartered workflow automation startup Zestl Software has raised an undisclosed sum in a pre-series A funding round from investors including Lead Angels, Eagle10 Ventures and Contrarian Vriddhi Fund.

The round also received contribution from other investors such as Gemba Capital, Genesis IT Innovations, Omphalos Ventures, former E&Y India national director Sunil Chandiramani and former Rothschild India managing director Sanjay Bhandarkar.

The startup plans to use the latest funding to expand its sales and marketing teams and continue to enhance the product. It also plans a full launch in the United States in the next six months.

Founded in 2015, by a Stanford alumnus Hardik Gandhi, Zestl has its flagship workflow platform, Zvolv, which is artificial intelligence (AI) driven and helps enterprises transform their operations by building intelligent, collaborative and built for mobile enterprise applications.

Hardik had earlier worked with Apple and Texas Instruments in the Bay Area.

The startup claims that Zvolv has garnered more than 25 clients including leading global quick service restaurant chains such as Domino’s Pizza, India’s largest retailers and fast-moving consumer goods makers, Future Group and other services and manufacturing companies. Zvolv automates and adds structure to chaotic people or data-centric collaboration processes, helps drive organisational efficiency and speeds up time to market.

“Existing SaaS (software as a service) collaboration solutions fail to automate enterprise processes end to end. The gaps end up killing user adoption and as a result RoI (return on investment). Zvolv gives users applications that are highly customized to specific business processes” said Prashant Pansare, co-founder, Eagle10 Ventures.

Source - Economic Times

Mumbai Based Fintech Startup Market Pulse Raises Seed Funding from Lead Angels

Mumbai based fintech startup, Market Pulse Technologies has raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from Lead Angels Network and Chatur Ideas platform. The company plans to use the funding to expand its product coverage to other financial markets and build a strong tech team.

Founder of Market Pulse, Amit Dhakad stated “We are pleased to have strategic investors embark on a journey with us to empower the investing world. We have built the right product for Traders in the Indian commodities market and this round of funding will help us broaden our influence and impact on the larger financial industry.”

Market Pulse is set out to democratize and provide everyone with access to Financial Market Data & Insights in a way that's easy, intuitive and highly personalized.

It caters to investor population in India including Traders, Investors, Businessmen and Market Enthusiasts.

The app is a fresh take on the way information is made available to the user. This is reflected in its innovative and user-friendly features. The app is Tailor-Made for every user, thus enhancing user experience & enabling informed decisions.

“User experience is most critical for a consumer facing product and the focus of the Market Pulse team on this should take them to great heights. Lead Angels is pleased to share its experience with the team and assist them in every way possible to reach their potential” said Sushanto Mitra Founder & CEO, Lead Angels.

In just 15 months, Market Pulse has empowered over over 100K+ traders in the commodities markets in India. Today, Market Pulse is a rare app to have garnered a 4.7 rating on Google Play Store and in just 6 months, was ranked among the top Financial Apps on Play Store. Users have praised the accuracy, speed and reliability of the platform along with it’s constant improvements and developments.

The company is primarily a tech company and has built the entire platform in-house. It’s home-grown technology gives it complete control over reliability and enables it to provide a sophisticated platform to everyone for free.

Lead Angels Network Leads Pre-Series A Investment in Indore-Based ShopKirana

Lead Angels Network bets on local Indian innovation to inject technology in the Kirana business. ShopKirana has raised an undisclosed amount in pre-series A from Lead Angels, Incubate fund Japan and senior executives from top FMCG Companies.

ShopKirana is a B2B technology and supply chain focused company that aims to empower retailers to be competitive by providing technology, operational expertise and scale advantage. Idea is to partner with thousands of retailers (by becoming part of their supply chain) and making it the biggest and quickest go-to-market channel for products and services.

$300Bn Indian retail market is still largely (~92%) unorganized. ~9M small and fragmented retailers lack technology and are plagued with supply chain inefficiencies. ShopKirana is using M-commerce by integrating the existing unorganised supply chain cobweb into systematic hub and spoke franchise system using technology. It plans to tap the Kirana retail segment, 92% of which is unorganised. They are helping the retailers in keeping up with the changing retail space by providing them a one-stop solution for sourcing. They are using a digital platform for 24/7 ordering, 24hrs delivery and consolidated payments, with the help of which, they are able to quickly fulfill orders. Leveraging on their strong relationships with the retailers, they are also launching brands on their platform, which need a digital platform to launch and need data analytics to catch up the trends in the market. Through integrating retailers and brands on a platform, ShopKirana hopes to create India’s largest go-to-market channel via retailers.

“ShopKirana is working on sustainable value creation by simultaneously increasing efficiency in the supply chain and aggregating purchasing power of small businesses. I believe that the team has collectively exhaustive skill sets with a very firm focus on areas where startups seem to fail: execution and consistency in service quality.” says Pragnesh Podar, lead investor from Lead Angels group.

This model is retailer centric and will remain that way. ShopKirana will connect with 1+ lakh retailers in next 1-2 year, helping them to improve on sourcing and inventory turn over. It will help regional/domestic brands to go national while helping international brands reach smaller markets. It will also help established FMCG companies to get quicker reach to retailer and visibility of accurate and competitive POS data.

“We have already tested services in 2 cities with 5000+ Kirana stores, delivered 200+ orders /day and achieved sales of over Rs. 10+ lakh / day. We will reach 10,000+ customers and will be delivering 1000+ orders/day soon,” said ShopKirana co-founder Deepak Dhanotiya.