Furniture E-Tailer Pepperfry May Raise $100 Mn from Existing Investors

Private Equity fund of American investment bank, Goldman Sachs, along with Norwest Venture Partners and Bertelsmann India Investments (BII) may invest $100 million in furniture e-tailer Pepperfry, reported ET Tech, citing sources privy to the development. All three investors are already investors in Pepperfry.

The funds raised will help Pepperfry expand its offline presence and diversify to strengthen its position in furniture market which is riding on a wave set off by Global giant like Ikea, a Siss company entered India last year.

Ikea, along with search giant Google, are contemplating to enter Indian e-commerce market as they both are coming up with their own e-commerce stores under their own brand names respectively, to sell their branded products under one roof.

Existing investors of Pepperfry are looking at investing $100 million into the company and according to the report, fresh equity will be issued in the proposed round in which the investors will seek to maintain their level of holdings in the company.

In July 2015, Goldman Sachs, Bertelsmann India Investments and Norwest Venture Partners, have contributed in $100 million Series-D rounding of funding of Pepperfry. This was followed by an additional 210 crore investment in September 2016.

Founded in 2012, by Ambareesh Murty and Ashish Shah, Pepperfry.com has raised a total of about $198 million in funding over 6 rounds. Their latest funding was raised about $34 million in March last year, according to data by Crunchbase. NOtably, in the same month of same year, Pepperfry's rival, Urban Ladder, too had raised $12 million from Kalaari Capital, SAIF Partners, Sequoia Capital and Steadview Capital, in its second internal round of funding.

According to industry estimates, India's online home-furnishing and furniture retail market is expected to cross $1.1 billion in revenue this year, up from about $900 million in 2016.

Matrix Backed Five Star Business Finance Raises $50M Led by Norwest Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital

Five Star Business Finance Limited (“Five Star”) announced today the successful closure of its equity fund raise of $50 million (Rs 333 crore) led by Norwest Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital. The existing investors, Matrix Partners and Morgan Stanley Private Equity Asia, also participated in the round.

Five Star operates 110 branches across South India and serves over 18,000 customers and specializes in extending secured, small business and housing loans. For FY18, the Company is expected to double its loan book to INR 1000 crores. It plans to further expand its footprint across different states in India.

D. Lakshmipathy, Chairman and Managing Director, Five Star remarked, “Five Star plays a very niche role in today’s markets by serving the large multitudes of small enterprises which are typically not catered to by most formal financial services players. Over the years, we have developed an expertise in assessing their cash flows and in underwriting their credit, while keeping the asset quality intact. It’s a great pleasure to invite two marquee investors – Norwest and Sequoia as our partners for growth. They, along with our existing investors – Morgan Stanley and Matrix Partners coupled with our 15+ Bank relationships, add tremendous strength to our balance sheet and growth plans, as we aim to emerge as a leading player in the small business and small housing loans segment.”

Vikram Vaidyanathan, Managing Director, Matrix India added, “As his first investors, we’ve been privileged to partner with Mr Lakshmipathy on his journey of building a long standing financial institution. Their single focus on the small borrower sets them apart and they’ve strived continuously to set the standard for growth, profitability and governance in this space. We welcome Norwest and Sequoia to the partnership.”

Five Star is a small ticket business and housing finance company that provides secured loans to MSME customers such as small shop owners (provision stores, small restaurants, textile stores, bakery outlets, medical stores etc), small & medium machine shop operators, self-employed people etc. Five Star also provides loans for the purpose of home improvement to MSME customers.

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Multi Stage Investment Firm Norwest Invest In Two Health Startups

A global, multi-stage investment firm, Norwest Venture Partners has invested $1.5 million each in two early-stage healthcare-focused startups, Multiplier Solutions, and ABI Health. This is the first institutional round of funding raised by both the companies.

According to a media report, Norwest has initiated this investment with the intent of merging both B2B Ventures which is expected to take place over the next 12-18 months. The report further adds, Norwest, who has not yet announced the investment had closed this round in the second quarter of the last fiscal.

Hyderabad-based Multiplier Solutions was founded in 2013 by IIM Calcutta and SP Jain alumna, Vikram Kumar and Saumya Prakash. The startup works with leading hospitals diagnostics chains, clinics, and offers a product platform that integrates artificial intelligence and machine learning. It claims to provide improved diagnostics as well as predicting clinical outcomes to its users.

Generating revenue through a subscription-based model, Multiplier has its presence in all top metros of India.

Talking about ABI Health, this four-year-old startup works with consumer devices manufacturers and a telecom operator that have healthcare services on the cloud, as part of their data rollout. It is a health exchange and image management cloud software provider which has its own imaging suite, called Spectra, which connects all stakeholders - doctors, hospitals, and patients.

Headquartered in Bengaluru, startups also operates in the US and Peru.

Norwest has an extensive healthcare portfolio in India which includes, Thyrocare, Nationwide Primary Care, paediatric and neonatal care hospital chain Ovum, Perfint and cloud-based healthcare information technology company Attune.

Zenoti Raises $15M in Series B Funding Round Led by Norwest Venture Partners

Zenoti, a leading cloud-based management platform, today announced a $15 million Series B funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners with participation from returning investor Accel Partners. The funding will be used to expand market share, drive product innovation and help with talent acquisition. Growing rapidly in the spa, salon and medi-spa arenas, Zenoti will use portions of this new round of funding to accelerate growth with expansion into the fitness and yoga space.

Zenoti previously raised $6 Million in Series A funding from Accel Partners.

Zenoti’s all-in-one solution supports the entire business ecosystem of operational tasks. Its software platform was developed for reliability and scale, using enterprise-level technology made available to businesses of all sizes from a single location brand to large enterprise chains with thousands of outlets.

“Zenoti is filling a void for mid to large wellness chains by solving chronic challenges associated with rapid growth,” said Mohan Kumar, executive director of Norwest Venture Partners. “Enterprise brands are starting to understand that Zenoti technology affords increased efficiencies and the seamless ability to protect their brand identities and customer experiences. Other players in the market are not addressing the need to manage a brand's distributed operations or provide an integrated view of business performance across multiple locations.”

“Over the last few years, we were focused on building a strong foundation of technology and customer service excellence,” said Sudheer Koneru, CEO of Zenoti.  “We’ve demonstrated this by transitioning leading, enterprise brands in multiple regions to Zenoti. This funding enables us to establish ourselves as a leader in the industry.”

Zenoti believes that today’s large businesses need an integrated, enterprise-level solution, which addresses the consolidation, investments and rapid growth in the industry. As the most comprehensive solution in the market today, Zenoti offers a host of unique assets such as integrated, custom reporting, business intelligence tools, marketing automation, inventory management, and a complete mobile solution. Data migration services, cloud reliability with 99.9% uptime, and pinnacle customer service are more reasons why existing customers are pleased and new business is strong.

The company is serving the unmet needs of large enterprises such as Lakme Salons, Naturals, Kaya Skin Clinics, Sothys Malaysia, Bio Essence and Massage Green. They also cater to the luxury market including brands such as Elemis, and have recently expanded into the resort space adding Taj Hotels, Melco Crown, Crown Hotels, and Alaya hotels to their customer mix.

Ovum Hospitals Raises $5M in Series A Funding from IL&FS and Norwest Venture Partners

Neonatal Care and Research Institute Pvt. Ltd. (operating under  the “Ovum Hospitals” brand name), a women and child specialty hospital focused on high-end neonatal care, announced today that it has raised $5 million in Series A funding from IL&FS Investment Managers and Norwest Venture Partners. Unitus Capital acted as an exclusive advisor to Ovum Hospitals on the transaction. This new round of financing will be used to set up similar facilities in and around Bangalore.

It had earlier raised funding from NationWide Primary Healthcare Services, a primary healthcare chain. A portion of this round went towards providing a partial exit to Nationwide.

The company was founded in 2011 by a team of four doctors - Drs. Adarsh Somashekar, Praveen Venkatagiri, Venkata Reddy, and Srisailesh Vitthala. The founding team has extensive UK-based training and experience and returned to India with a mission to provide standardized, high quality, affordable neonatal care. In 2014, the company extended its services to include maternal care, and Ovum Hospitals was born.  Co-founder and Director of Ovum Hospitals, Dr. Praveen Venkatagiri says, “We want to bring in best practices in Maternal and Neonatal health care. In a short span of time,  we were able to deliver high standard neonatal intensive care to the infants born even at 24 weeks and weighing only 500 gms at birth.”

“While gynecology services are abundant in India, demographic changes have caused an increase in high-risk deliveries and neonatal complications. Hence, there is a growing need for high quality, affordable, neonatal intensive care,” said Mark Silgardo, senior managing partner at IIML.

Ovum Hospitals has quickly expanded to four locations in Bangalore. It started with providing NICU coverage to the Milann Fertility Center and Chinmaya Mission Hospital and has now grown to a 30-bed maternal and NICU care at Banaswadi, and an IVF facility in Kalyan Nagar.

“In less than five years, Ovum has been able to build multiple neonatal hospitals using an impressive capital efficient business model,” said Mohan Kumar, executive director of Norwest Venture Partners, India.  “For a mission-driven organization in a challenging environment, this is commendable.”

With state-of-the-art NICU, Ovum Hospitals strives to reduce the mortality and morbidity rate of newborns. The in-house training program ensures that the team of doctors, nurses, and support staff are always equipped with the latest clinical knowledge and technology to offer high-quality patient care, the right way.

Pepperfry.com raises $15mn funding from Bertelsmann India & NVP

Mumbai based online furniture and home products marketplace Pepperfry.com has raised $15 million of funding led by Bertelsmann India Investments (BII) and its existing investor Norwest Venture Partners (NVP).

Bertelsmann India Investments (BII), the strategic investment arm of the international media company Bertelsmann in India, BII concentrates on early stage investments into growing companies in the digital media landscape. NVP on other hand is Silicon Valley-based investment firm and the very first series-A funding of Pepperfry in 2011 was $5 million from Norwest Venture Partners only.

Pepperfry.com was founded in July 2011 by twi ex-eBay employees Ambareesh Murty and Ashish Shah. Pepperfry had earlier raised $13 million from NVP in previous rounds of funding.

Ambareesh Murty, co-founder & CEO of Pepperfry.com said, "Our vision is to be India’s one stop shop for Furniture and Home products and we have focused on leveraging our in-depth category expertise to establish the merchandising and supply chain infrastructure required to fulfill this vision."

Pepperfry started its business operations in January 2012 to sell furniture and home merchandize online and today the company offer more than 45,000 products to across various categories such as - Furniture, Home Décor, Furnishings, Kitchen and Pet Supplies.

Pepperfry was the recipient of the '2012 Red Herring Asia Top 100' award which honours the most promising private technology ventures from Asia.

The Pepperfry investment came just a day after when Flipkart raised $210 million of funding from DST global. Funding for the e-commerce companies in India are pouring in from across the globe however vertical e-commerce portals like Pepperfry.com also catching up the funding pace with mainstream players.