Exfinity Venture Announced Partial Exit from One of Their Early Investments in Mad Street Den Inc (MSD)

Exfinity Venture Fund, an early-stage VC Fund that was one of the first funds to focus exclusively on B2B technology investments, announced a partial exit from one of their early investments in Mad Street Den Inc (MSD). While Exfinity has exited partially, and given the aggressive growth of the company, it is safe to infer that MSD will not only return the entire fund but also will provide significant upside over the fund size. The secondaries were purchased by existing investors, FalconEdge, who led the company's Series B.

Exfinity is now raising its third fund aggregating to Rs. 500 crores based on the same thesis and has already announced its first investment in Ati Motors, a company which is into autonomous robots for material movement. Exfinity’s portfolio comprises some marquee names in B2B SaaS, Enterprise and Deep Tech viz. MoEngage, Locus, Pyxis, Vernacular.ai, Deep Vision, Log 9 Materials etc.

MSD is one of the first true blue AI companies from India which has a platform called Vue.ai, which powers end to end automation and digital experience management using AI for Multi-Billion Dollar Retailers including Diesel, Mercadolibre, Tata Group and more.

The company's latest platform play, Blox.ai, puts it on a trajectory with global A.I players, allowing it to bring its offerings from Retail into education, healthcare, finance and many more industries. With the rapid growth of Blox.ai platform, the company is positioned to become the biggest AI player in the India-US corridor.

Speaking on the exit, Shailesh Ghorpade, Managing Partner & CIO, who served on the Board of MSD said that “MSD has had a fascinating journey so far. Exfinity funded the company in the seed stage as the founders were extremely accomplished and they had a clear vision of where they wanted to go. During this course, MSD has achieved a pole position in the digitisation of the retail segment while growing exponentially in others & bagging multi-year contracts from some of the best names in the business. We believe MSD is just blossoming out and they have enormous potential. It is extremely satisfying to be a part of a journey of one of the earliest AI companies from India”.

Ashwini Asokan, co-founder and CEO of MSD stated, “We've been incredibly lucky to have the folks at Exfinity by our side since day 0. From operational help to hiring to business development and more, Shailesh and team have been there for us through so many different milestones. As a fund with a clear deep tech and enterprise tech thesis, they've created an entire cross border portfolio of companies that are building the next generation of businesses in the segment. We're barely just getting started with our journey here at MSD. Our vision for all things AI is big and we hope to take the lessons from this first phase of our journey with Exfinity with us, all the way forward”.

Intelligent Retail Platform Vue.ai Raises $17 Mn from Falcon Edge, Sequoia India and Global Brain

Mad Street Den, the maker of Vue.ai, a platform for intelligent retail automation, today announced it has raised a $17 million Series B led by Falcon Edge Capital, with participation from Sequoia Capital India and Global Brain, a GP of KDDI Innovation Fund.

The new round brings the company’s total capital raised to $27.5 million. After experiencing a fourfold annual revenue increase, the funds will be used to grow the team, deliver on the product roadmap and scale the company’s existing customer base that already includes leading retailers from across the globe like Macy’s, Mercadolibre and Tata.

Last September, the AI startup had received undisclosed amount in strategic investment from KIDDI Corporation of Tokyo, Japan. The funds have been routed through KIDDI’s investment arm, KDDI Open Innovation Fund 2, managed by Global Brain.

Retailers have entered an era where consumers expect a seamless brand experience thanks to behemoths like Amazon and Alibaba who are using AI to personalize products and services for shoppers. The battle to stay competitive comes at a tremendous cost to retailers who are projected to spend more than $7B billion on AI over the next 3 years. By offering a one-stop shop across the value chain, Vue.ai is the first AI solution to automate critical functions across departments heavily dependent on human intuition, unifying data about products, people and processes.

Vue.ai combines seven different products to offer retailers a unified system used as a ‘neural network’ for decision-making. Using a centralized data brain, the platform digitally maps a retail product’s DNA, then translates product information into language that teams can easily understand. With better accuracy and insights, retailers can easily decode the qualities of their merchandise, make intelligent updates on the fly, and deliver unique experiences along every step of the customer journey.

“The future of retail is entertainment. The experience economy we see today is the start of that era,” said Ashwini Asokan, CEO and Founder of Vue.ai. “Brands are shifting to designing worlds that consumers want to be a part of and that has to integrate with the new ways people shop. Vue is the electricity that powers all these complicated and important retail functions so retailers can focus on the business of entertaining you"

"The Vue.ai team is on a mission to put AI and intelligent automation in the hands of teams across the globe in ways that improve productivity and growth multi-fold,” said Anandamoy Roychowdhary, CTO and Director of Sequoia Capital India. “We’ve seen incredible growth in how they’ve brought this value across multiple functions in the retail industry in just two years since we started this journey with them. Sequoia India is excited to partner with Falcon Edge in this round, enabling Ashwini and Anand to scale Vue.ai globally.”

California-headquartered firm which has an office in Chennai, Vue.ai was launched by husband-wife duo - Ashwini Asokan and Anand Chandrasekaran in 2016 as the first AI brand from its parent company Mad Street Den. The team is comprised of neuroscientists and AI experts from IBM, Intel and DARPA. The company serves major retailers across the US, UK, India, Middle East and Latin America.

The company has recently announced Human Model Generator, an AI that can generate garment-to-model images & predict how the garment fits.

Chennai's Computer Vision-based AI Startup MadStreetDen Raises Funding from Japan's KDDI

Chennai and California, US-based artificial Intelligence (AI) powered retail technology startup, Mad Street Den, has received strategic investment from KIDDI Corporation of Tokyo, Japan. The funds have been routed through KIDDI’s investment arm, KDDI Open Innovation Fund 2, managed by Global Brain. The financials of the investment was not disclosed.

Backed by marquee VC Sequoia Capital, in 2016, Mad Street Den intends to use the funds it would raise during the current financing round to enhance their AI capabilities and grow their sales & marketing force.

Global Brain highly evaluated Mad Street Den’s expertise in AI/ computer vision area and business acumen and decided the investment. Together with KDDI, Global Brain will support the company in building alliances and partnership to expand their business, especially in the Japanese and Asian market, said Global Brain in a statement.

Founded in 2013, by a Neuroscientist-Designer duo - Anand Chandrasekaran and Ashwini Asokan, Mad Street Den provides "Vue.AI", which is a one-stop AI and Image Recognition platform for apparel retailers (from "big box" department stores to online marketplaces) who are experiencing drastic operational changes due to rapidly increasing penetration of online commerce.

Vue.ai offers such products as data classification/ catalog data management (including AI-based automated data-tagging with attributes, titles, descriptions, drastically improving product discovery and searchability, reducing operational costs and the time required to digitize a product and go to market. The solution also makes it easier to eliminate redundancy in the catalog and provide a singular view into the entire inventory).

Its marquee product is a cutting-edge human model generator which is an AI-based product generating garment-to-model images, predicting how the garment fits. Vue.ai's algorithms also analyze the extracted catalog data with user behavior and help the retailers' marketing/product/cataloging teams not only to automate their processes and reduce costs but also to drive conversions and to increase revenues. With the solution, fashion brands can provide their customers with a great user experience in online shopping, such as good retrieval accuracy or "AI stylist" which is an AI-based styling and outfitting solution.

"At KDDI, we are a company that continues to provide excitement as we move forward with the integration of telecommunications and life design. By investing in venture companies that can deploy services on a global scale, we help generate new business to create new customer experience value," said KIDDI, in a press release.

In May this year, an another retail technology startup Mobisy raised funding of $3.5 million, led by SIDBI Venture Capital Limited (SVCL), a venture capital arm of Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) specializing direct and fund of funds. Mobisy helps companies increase their sales and streamline supple chain through its mobile first SaaS solution, has announced on Monday that it has received a second round of venture capital.

Last week, BuyMore, a brand of Bangalore-based Counfreedise Retail Services Ltd, India’s leading e-commerce aggregator for the online retail sector in India has tied up with Hong Kong Circle Tech to enable 450 brands from China to enter India through e-commerce way and get listed on e-commerce platforms operating in India, including Flipkart, Amazon and Myntra.

[Top Image - FortuneIndia.com]

Chennai's Computer Vision-based AI Startup MadStreetDen Raises Funding from Japan's KDDI

Chennai and California, US-based artificial Intelligence (AI) powered retail technology startup, Mad Street Den, has received strategic investment from KIDDI Corporation of Tokyo, Japan. The funds have been routed through KIDDI’s investment arm, KDDI Open Innovation Fund 2, managed by Global Brain. The financials of the investment was not disclosed.

Backed by marquee VC Sequoia Capital, in 2016, Mad Street Den intends to use the funds it would raise during the current financing round to enhance their AI capabilities and grow their sales & marketing force.

Global Brain highly evaluated Mad Street Den’s expertise in AI/ computer vision area and business acumen and decided the investment. Together with KDDI, Global Brain will support the company in building alliances and partnership to expand their business, especially in the Japanese and Asian market, said Global Brain in a statement.

Founded in 2013, by a Neuroscientist-Designer duo - Anand Chandrasekaran and Ashwini Asokan, Mad Street Den provides "Vue.AI", which is a one-stop AI and Image Recognition platform for apparel retailers (from "big box" department stores to online marketplaces) who are experiencing drastic operational changes due to rapidly increasing penetration of online commerce.

Vue.ai offers such products as data classification/ catalog data management (including AI-based automated data-tagging with attributes, titles, descriptions, drastically improving product discovery and searchability, reducing operational costs and the time required to digitize a product and go to market. The solution also makes it easier to eliminate redundancy in the catalog and provide a singular view into the entire inventory).

Its marquee product is a cutting-edge human model generator which is an AI-based product generating garment-to-model images, predicting how the garment fits. Vue.ai's algorithms also analyze the extracted catalog data with user behavior and help the retailers' marketing/product/cataloging teams not only to automate their processes and reduce costs but also to drive conversions and to increase revenues. With the solution, fashion brands can provide their customers with a great user experience in online shopping, such as good retrieval accuracy or "AI stylist" which is an AI-based styling and outfitting solution.

"At KDDI, we are a company that continues to provide excitement as we move forward with the integration of telecommunications and life design. By investing in venture companies that can deploy services on a global scale, we help generate new business to create new customer experience value," said KIDDI, in a press release.

In May this year, an another retail technology startup Mobisy raised funding of $3.5 million, led by SIDBI Venture Capital Limited (SVCL), a venture capital arm of Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) specializing direct and fund of funds. Mobisy helps companies increase their sales and streamline supple chain through its mobile first SaaS solution, has announced on Monday that it has received a second round of venture capital.

Last week, BuyMore, a brand of Bangalore-based Counfreedise Retail Services Ltd, India’s leading e-commerce aggregator for the online retail sector in India has tied up with Hong Kong Circle Tech to enable 450 brands from China to enter India through e-commerce way and get listed on e-commerce platforms operating in India, including Flipkart, Amazon and Myntra.

[Top Image - FortuneIndia.com]

Sequoia Backs Chennai-based AI Startup Mad Street Den

Chennai-CA based artificial intelligence start-up Mad Street Den Systems Pvt. Ltd has raised an undisclosed amount in a Series A funding round from Sequoia Capital India and its existing investors Exfinity Venture Partners LLP and GrowX Venture Management Pvt. Ltd.

Founded in 2013 by husband-wife duo Anand Chandrasekaran, a neuroscientist and a Stanford alumni, and Ashwani Asokan, a former Intel Corp. executive, the Chennai-based start-up had earlier raised $1.5 million in January 2015 from Exfinity Ventures and growX Ventures. Anand and Ashwani have had spent more than 25 years combined working in the U.S.

“Mad Street Den is a pioneer in what we think of as the next wave of AI start-ups, which will be capable of making versatile intelligence possible with small data sets, and yield magical results. Significant learning, and not just label training is at the heart of these start-ups, which are only now beginning to emerge,” said Gautam Mago, managing director at Sequoia Capital India Advisors.

Post this funding, the company now plans to deploy the funds to expand further into global markets. Beyond developing its core AI technology, Mad Street Den has focused on developing products for e-commerce via its Vue.ai sub brand which is a platform that helps fashion e-tailers provide visual recommendations to consumers.

The company claims to have a pipeline of more than 100 clients in India, West Asia and the US. In India, it counts fashion e-tailers such as Craftsvilla and Voonik as clients.

Similar to what Mad Street is doing in computer vision and A.I., there are other startups globally trying to crack visual search. Visual search start-ups help companies enable their users to discover products online, based on photos of objects in the real world. In India, companies such as iLenze (which raised $500,000 in funding last year) and SnapShopr (which raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding) offer visual search platforms.