Manipal Group Chair Ranjan Pai Reportedly Picking Up Stake in Firstcry with ₹250 Crore Investment

Manipal Group chairman Ranjan Pai is in advanced stage talks to pick up a stake in FirstCry, as part of a secondary share sale, by investing ₹250 crore investment in the Pune based e-commerce firm. With this, Firstcry could have a valuation of about $3 billion reported Economic Times.

The total secondary share sale would be around $50-60 million, or close to ₹500 crore (as per current USD exchange rates) and Pai is likely to invest ₹250 crore.

Around $100 million worth of secondary share sale is likely to be formalised. Other institutional investors are also in the process of picking up a secondary stake in the Pune-based Firstcry, an Omnichannel retailer.

The funding is being primed as a pre-IPO round for Firstcry, which counts Masayoshi Son-led SoftBank as its largest Shareholder with 29% stake.

Earlier reports suggest that SoftBank is likely to sell a part of its 29% holding if the deal happens.

Premji Invest owns about 9-11% stake in FirstCry while Mahindra Retail holds 12-13% and TPG has a 6-7% stake.

According to Traxn, FirstCry has raised a total funding of $965 million in over 10 rounds. It last raised $315 million in Series E, in March 2021.

Early this month, it was reported that Firstcry spin-off, Xpressbees, may raise $100 million as an investment by Canada's Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, one of the largest pension plans in the world. This fundraise could value the logistics company at about $1.4 billion.

Automated Marketing Platform Verloop Raises $3 Mn from from IDFC Parampara, Kris Gopalakrishnan and Ranjan Pai

Philadelphia and Bangalore-based Verloop, a customer support and engagement automation platform, has announced the closing of a $3 million in Series A round of funding led by IDFC Parampara Fund, an early stage startup fund jointly established by IDFC group and venture capital firm Parampara Capital.

The round also saw the participation from Kris Gopalakrishnan - Infosys Co-founder and Dr Ranjan Pai - Chairman of the Manipal Education and Medical Group (MEMG).

Earlier in November 2016, Verloop had raised undisclosed amount in seed funding from Growth Story, Anand Chandrasekaran, Mohandas Pai and Suresh Vaswani - President of Dell Services, and Kris Gopalakrishnan.

The startup will use the capital raised in enhancing its customer engagement platform as the startup expands its team and scales operations to address the global market for automated customer services and marketing that MetricNet estimates is valued at US$19 billion annually.

Founded in 2016 by Gaurav Singh, Verloop claims to be the world's smartest conversational marketing and sales platform, which is powered by its own machine learning algorithms developed in-house especially the algorithms in NLP, NLU and pattern matching has. The platfor has Verloop bot and allows to automate FAQs, build automated flows, capture leads and schedule meetings 24x7.

“Our conversational automation platform already works with more than 5000 clients across eCommerce, Healthcare, Education, Entertainment & Lifestyle sectors across 37 countries," said Gaurav Singh, the 28-year old Founder & CEO of Verloop.

"This investment is a striking endorsement from some of the savviest and most well-known names in start-up and tech ecosystem and comes at a time when we are continuing to hire top talent and build further traction for the business", he said.

Prior to starting Verloop, Gaurav had earlier founded GoDeliver, an on-demand delivery startup, acquired by its larger competitor MagicTiger in July 2015. Prior to this, he has worked at Vizury, a growth marketing platform, now re-branded as Lemnisk.

Jatin Desai, General Partner at IDFC-Parampara, "People are seeking out a conversational experience with brands and Verloop helps organizations do this at scale. Over the last several months we’ve undertaken an intricate assessment of the Verloop platform, its architecture and the product roadmap. We were very impressed at the way the team has built Verloop and are delighted to partner with Gaurav and his team. The use-cases they’ve built are very interesting and there is great potential for the product to verticalize and mine the potential for automated customer engagement across industries, across countries and across languages."

“There have been a few notable success stories of Saas-based ventures from India and we believe Verloop certainly has the credentials to emerge a leader in the Conversational AI market that is currently led by players such as Drift and Intercom, globally,” he added.

Kris Gopalakrishnan, Co-Founder, Infosys, said, "We are seeing a massive behavioural shift with people demanding personalized and conversational brand experiences. Large, growing organizations and celebrity brands will be hard pressed to meet this requirement profitably and at-scale as interactions run into multiple millions. This is where ML (machine learning) technology coupled with human ingenuity comes in and can help harvest the potential in these interactions. Verloop has built an easily scalable model to target a huge addressable market.”

More than 120 million unique conversations have been processed since Verloop launched operations in late 2016. Verloop use-cases span Marketing & Sales (Lead Gen qualification, conversational campaigns, upsell and cross-sell etc), Customer Support (automated helpdesk, personalized onboarding of customers etc) and Celebrity Brand Management (persona management, engaging with fans, pre- and post- launch etc).

Clients who have leveraged the Verloop platform include Nykaa, Qtrove, Pipa Bella, Portea, Apollo Munich Health Insurance, and Aadhaar Bridge. The Verloop platform has also been used by some of the biggest stars in Indian entertainment including Rajinikanth for his movie Kaala. Several other mainstream and niche celebrities, publication houses and entertainment magazines are utilising conversational automation to connect with fans and readers.

Verloop.io is a language-agnostic platform that already supports 7 Indian languages including Hindi, English, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali and Hinglish. In addition, the company has developed a new messaging protocol and a patent-pending technology for bot to human hand-off of conversations when it detects that the conversation can be better served by a human chat rep.

Verloop was part of the Y Combinator Startup School 2017 and has made numerous machine learning contributions to MIT Machine Learning libraries, Facebook ML libraries and other open source ML libraries. The Verloop team also delivered a presentation on mixed language (Hinglish) detection and understanding at a Bertelsmann conference in Hamburg.

IDFC-Parampara is Rs 100 crore corpus fund that was launched last year by IDFC Alternatives, the private equity arm of IDFC group, and venture capital firm Parampara Capital. The fund has so far made 4 investments including Verloop. The three other investsee startups are -- Play Shifu (November 2017), Chakr Innovation (April 2018) and Entropik Technology (July 2018)

AEON Learning Raises $3.2 Mn in Series B from Ranjan Pai’s MEMG Family Office LLP

AEON Learning, a leading edtech company based out of Bangalore has raised USD 3.2mn in Series B funding from MEMG Family Office LLP, a fund set up by Dr. Ranjan Pai, chairman of the Manipal Education and Medical Group. AEON will use the latest investments towards growing business from its university partnerships, and skill programs. The startup expects to reach a student base of over 100,000 in the next 5 years and is currently operating in India and the US.

AEON Learning, offers its platforms Avagmah and Acadgild, that has continuing higher education offered by its academic partners and technology skills courses to working professionals; helping them upgrade their skills and capabilities to remain relevant in today’s fast evolving employment scenario.

Karthik KS, founder and CEO of AEON Learning says, “The combined and complementary strengths of Avagmah and Acadgild have already positioned AEON Learning at the forefront of the tech-enabled education revolution in India. With a proven track record of successful execution we are now ready to scale up and serve more users with an integrated portfolio of technology skills and in-demand higher education courses.”

“We are glad to have MEMG Family Office LLP as our investment partners who believe in our vision of making continuing education more accessible to working professionals worldover and supporting in growing our existing 7 academic partnerships and technology skills programs ”, added Karthik.

Dr. Ranjan Pai, CEO and MD of MEMG says, “Skills gap is a huge roadblock for continuing economic growth not just in India, but around the world. AEON Learning has the right product portfolio and a highly competent leadership team, which is making a difference in the evolving online education industry. The global online education market opportunity is huge, and we are glad to partner and support AEON Learning as they gear up to leverage this opportunity.”

In future, AEON Learning plans to expand to new geographies and go global with its academic collaborations. The company will continue to explore fundraise to realise this ambition. AEON Learning currently has a total student base of 20,000 spanning across 66 countries, and works with 7 leading institutes and university partners, 36 corporate partners, with 20% business originating from the US.

Recently, AEON Learning acquired the business of online edtech startup Acadgild, which takes a differentiated approach and offers a hybrid model that combines live classes and an online platform for learning. Acadgild was co-founded by Vikalp Jain and Vinod Dham in 2014.

AEON Learning has cumulatively secured $6.5 million from marquee investors like Kris Gopalakrishnan, co-founder of Infosys; Atul Nishar, founder of Hexaware and Aptech Computer Education; Singapore based Lionrock Capital; Neeraj Bhargava, of Zodius Capital, Jupiter Capital and Enki in the past. Both Avagmah and Acadgild have been promoted by GrowthStory.

In the last financial year, AEON Learning has expanded its operations from just in South India to now being present in 150 towns and cities across the country and have posted a combined growth of 100%. The company aims to tap into the fast growing online higher education market, which is pegged to be a $1.96 billion industry by 2021 (as per a latest KPMG-Google report).

Last week only, an another edtech startup CollPoll has raised undisclosed amount in Pre-Series A funding round led by Manipal Global Education Services.

In November 2017, an another edtech startup Perspectico raised seed funding from Delhi University and Government of Delhi Incubator.

Additionally, AICTE tied-up with Fourth Ambit, a Kerala-based edtech startup, to connect over 10,000 tech insitutes across India through online portals.

AEON Learning Raises $3.2 Mn in Series B from Ranjan Pai’s MEMG Family Office LLP

AEON Learning, a leading edtech company based out of Bangalore has raised USD 3.2mn in Series B funding from MEMG Family Office LLP, a fund set up by Dr. Ranjan Pai, chairman of the Manipal Education and Medical Group. AEON will use the latest investments towards growing business from its university partnerships, and skill programs. The startup expects to reach a student base of over 100,000 in the next 5 years and is currently operating in India and the US.

AEON Learning, offers its platforms Avagmah and Acadgild, that has continuing higher education offered by its academic partners and technology skills courses to working professionals; helping them upgrade their skills and capabilities to remain relevant in today’s fast evolving employment scenario.

Karthik KS, founder and CEO of AEON Learning says, “The combined and complementary strengths of Avagmah and Acadgild have already positioned AEON Learning at the forefront of the tech-enabled education revolution in India. With a proven track record of successful execution we are now ready to scale up and serve more users with an integrated portfolio of technology skills and in-demand higher education courses.”

“We are glad to have MEMG Family Office LLP as our investment partners who believe in our vision of making continuing education more accessible to working professionals worldover and supporting in growing our existing 7 academic partnerships and technology skills programs ”, added Karthik.

Dr. Ranjan Pai, CEO and MD of MEMG says, “Skills gap is a huge roadblock for continuing economic growth not just in India, but around the world. AEON Learning has the right product portfolio and a highly competent leadership team, which is making a difference in the evolving online education industry. The global online education market opportunity is huge, and we are glad to partner and support AEON Learning as they gear up to leverage this opportunity.”

In future, AEON Learning plans to expand to new geographies and go global with its academic collaborations. The company will continue to explore fundraise to realise this ambition. AEON Learning currently has a total student base of 20,000 spanning across 66 countries, and works with 7 leading institutes and university partners, 36 corporate partners, with 20% business originating from the US.

Recently, AEON Learning acquired the business of online edtech startup Acadgild, which takes a differentiated approach and offers a hybrid model that combines live classes and an online platform for learning. Acadgild was co-founded by Vikalp Jain and Vinod Dham in 2014.

AEON Learning has cumulatively secured $6.5 million from marquee investors like Kris Gopalakrishnan, co-founder of Infosys; Atul Nishar, founder of Hexaware and Aptech Computer Education; Singapore based Lionrock Capital; Neeraj Bhargava, of Zodius Capital, Jupiter Capital and Enki in the past. Both Avagmah and Acadgild have been promoted by GrowthStory.

In the last financial year, AEON Learning has expanded its operations from just in South India to now being present in 150 towns and cities across the country and have posted a combined growth of 100%. The company aims to tap into the fast growing online higher education market, which is pegged to be a $1.96 billion industry by 2021 (as per a latest KPMG-Google report).

Last week only, an another edtech startup CollPoll has raised undisclosed amount in Pre-Series A funding round led by Manipal Global Education Services.

In November 2017, an another edtech startup Perspectico raised seed funding from Delhi University and Government of Delhi Incubator.

Additionally, AICTE tied-up with Fourth Ambit, a Kerala-based edtech startup, to connect over 10,000 tech insitutes across India through online portals.

HomeLane Gets $4.5 Million Funding From Sequoia Capital & Others

Bengaluru-based home solution startup HomeLane has raised $4.5-million led by US venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. Notably, HomeLane is just 8-month-old startup and has managed to funding and thats too from VC like sequoia capital.

The fund-raise also saw a personal investments by billionaire investor and Manipal Education and Medical Group (MEMG) boss Ranjan Pai and Mohandas Pai, a former board member of Infosys and chairman of Manipal Global Education.

HomeLane is already backed and promoted by storied entrepreneur duo Ganesh Krishnan and Meena Ganesh. the husband-wife duo behind some of India’s most innovative, technology-led ventures including Portea Medical, BigBasket, BlueStone,avagmah and TutorVista. TutorVista was acquired by US and UK listed education leader Pearson for $213M in January 2011.

HomeLane is interior design and manufacturing provider. It offers personalized design service to customers at no extra cost where an experienced panel of interior designers works with customers to customize designs for houses. With more than 1000 projects delivered across the country, HomeLane has huge experience in helping customers build their dream home.

Founded just 8 months back by former Pearson India CEO Srikanth Iyer, along with former colleague Rama Harinath, HomeLane is a technology interfaced hybrid startup that supplies customizable kitchens, wardrobes and entertainment units. Unlike other online furniture e-tailers, who offer a range of movable furniture, HomeLane's focus is on modular, fixed furniture that has an average billing value of Rs 5 lakh upwards.

HomeLane has seen sales grow at 100% month-on-month just six months after launching operations in Bengaluru, said Srikanth Iyer, CEO, of HomeLane. The fund-raise, he said, would be used to expand in 10 cities over the next six months. HomeLane is looking to onboard 10,000 interior designers from around the country. "We would like to provide passionate designers the opportunity to work with HomeLane providing them part-time, work-from-home opportunities to augment their income," Srikanth said.