Israel's OurCrowd Joins Hand With LetsVenture To Fund Startups

A global leader in equity crowdfunding, OurCrowd has signed a strategic collaboration agreement with LetsVenture, India’s marketplace for startup funding.

As part of this partnership, OurCrowd will offer curated deals to Indian investor syndicates managed by LetsVenture, as well as showcase Indian startups on OurCrowd’s platform, giving selected Indian startups access to accredited investors globally and to business development opportunities.

Commenting on the development, Shanti Mohan, Co-founder and CEO, LetsVenture said, “Having made startup funding easy, our vision is to make angel investing easy with a focus on portfolio management (startup reporting, portfolio diversification and exits). The partnership with OurCrowd aligns with our vision of offering our investors access to some of the best startups across geographies including Israel, along with giving LetsVenture portfolio companies access to global investors for their next round of funding. In this partnership with one of the largest equity crowdfunding platforms globally, we do believe this is a win-win for both of us.”

OurCrowd and LetsVenture will be also be collaborating on an ‘India Fund’ to invest in Israeli, Indian and global startups. The investment into this fund would primarily be from family funds and HNWIs in India and OurCrowd’s global network of accredited investors.

Leveraging LetsVenture’s domestic network, OurCrowd will offer Indian corporates access to the Israeli innovation ecosystem.

“India is a critical growth market for our business with a huge number of very exciting startup investment opportunities in a range of sectors. Israel and India have a great joint heritage sharing many of the same entrepreneurial qualities that are the backbone of our economies. I am excited to be entering into this collaboration with LetsVenture, which I believe will deliver great value to our investors,” said Jon Medved, OurCrowd CEO.

In addition to this, LetsVenture will facilitate ‘Take to Market’ activities for OurCrowd’s portfolio companies to access the Indian market, the activities of which are under development by LetsVenture and are targeted to commence in 2018.

Managed by a team of seasoned investment professionals and led by serial entrepreneur Jon Medved, OurCrowd vets and selects opportunities, invests its own capital, and brings companies to its accredited membership of global investors. OurCrowd provides post-investment support to its portfolio companies, assigns industry experts as mentors, and takes board seats. The OurCrowd community of almost 20,000 investors from over 112 countries has invested over $450M into 120 portfolio companies and funds. OurCrowd already has thirteen exits to date, two IPO’s and eleven acquisitions.

Purple Style Labs Raises Rs 3 Cr from Calcutta Angels, Lets Venture & Others

Purple Style Labs has raised funding of INR 3 Cr from Calcutta Angels, Lets Venture, IIT Bombay alumnus and a clutch of bankers.

Purple Style Labs Pvt Ltd (PSL), founded in Aug 2015 by Abhishek Agarwal, an IIT-Bombay graduate and ex-banker with Deutsche. It aspires to be the biggest fashion house of India managing multiple designer brands in the premium, luxury as well as affordable retail segment.

PSL seamlessly combines designing and styling on a single platform to provide unique experience to end consumers via its offline/online platform called ‘The Stylist’. Contrary to the conventional marketplace model, PSL positions itself as a federation model where all the designer brands and stylists associated with PSL are centrally managed but at the same time retaining their autonomy.

Talking about Purple Style Labs, and the funding round Abhishek Agarwal CEO & Founder said, "We believe that an idea can scale in the Indian ecosystem without losing the path to profitability, only when it gets the right guidance from people who have historically created businesses in India. And we have been successful in bringing the right set of investors to guide us for the journey.”

Shivam Shah, Partner, Augment Ventures says “Purple Style Labs, has a unique approach, to disrupt the multi-billion dollar fashion Industry by building a digitally enabled, federation of designers. A solid technology platform, coupled with an entrepreneur who has clarity of vision, I am confident in Purple Style Labs ability to execute.”

The company has also recently on boarded senior executives, Nabeela Moinuddin (Ex- Deloitte, Vistaprint) and Nishank Gupta (Ex- Housing, Urban Clap)

This fund will be used to further develop the technology both on enterprise and end consumer side and increase the number of designers and stylists associated with the company.