Career Accelerator Startup Pesto Raises $2 Mn from Matrix India, Swiggy Founders and Others

Gurgaon-based Pesto Tech, a career accelerator startup has raised seed funding of about $ 2 Mn led by Matrix Partners India with contributions from Swiggy Founders Sriharsha Majety, Rahul Jaimani and Nandan Reddy; Innov8 Founder Ritesh Malik; Posist Founder Ashish Tulsian and Jack Yeung of OIC Capital among others.

Founded in 2017, by Ayush Jaiswal, Country Head of Startup Grind India, and Andrew Linfoot, co-Founder of co-working space firm The Anvil, Pesto upskills Indian software engineers by offering 12-week bootcamp to make the engineers Silicon Valley-ready and pair them with the worlds top tech companies.

As part of the training bootcamp, software engineers with a minimum of two years of experience are connected to mentors in the US and trained in soft-skills.

Pesto's hiring partners include Mimir HQ, Vaynermedia, Fossa.ai, Scale API, Embibe and Zinc.io

Rajat Agarwal, Vice President of Matrix India, shared in media, "Remote work is an early trend globally driven by a shortage of high-quality local talent, the rising cost of living in key technology hubs, and widespread adoption of enabling infrastructure. Pesto is on a mission to build a marketplace for quality remote talent from India and we strongly believe in their skilling led approach.”

Trainees at Pesto have to sign an income share agreement before joining the programme. Earlier, Ayush was quoted in media saying, "once the trained engineers earn over Rs 15 lakh per annum at a full-time remote job in an international tech company, they have to pay 17 percent of their annual income as training fee for the next three years, monthly."

Starting this January, Pesto has launched a new batch every month and accepts students on a rolling basis.

In the same month, Matrix Partners India closed its Fund III with corpus of over $300 million and plans to continue investing in companies across seed, early-stage, Series A and B stages in different sectors.

In March, Matrix India, along with Tiger Global led the ~ $41 Mn funding round of Ola Electric Mobility, the Electric Vehicle (EV) unit of ANI Technologies that owns the home-grown cab-hailing firm Ola

Source - People Matters

WittyFeed Secures Pre-Series A Funding From Anand Chandrasekaran, Apurva Chamaria, Others

Viral content marketing platform, WittyFeed has raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a Pre-Series-A round. The investment is led by independent and seasoned investors like Anand Chandrasekaran (Former Snapdeal/ Bharti Airtel CPO), Apurva Chamaria (VP & Head Corporate Marketing, HCL Technologies), Ritesh Malik (Co-Founder, Innov8), along with a group of other marquee investors.

Other investors who have joined hands in this round are seasoned entrepreneurs and professionals. The name includes Ashish Toshniwal (Y Media Labs, CEO), Ajeet Khurana (Angel Investor),  Aneil Mahajan (Ex COO, Bhaskar Group), Piyush Goel (Beyond Key Systems Pvt. Ltd., Founder & CEO), Singapore Angel Network, and Harsh Mani Tripathi (Pyoopil Education Technologies, Founder and CEO).

The company plans to use the proceedings from the funding to strengthen its technology infrastructure, enhance its distribution platform, as well as towards augmenting its product portfolio. This funding will also be used for the expansion of its sales team to dive deep into the content-driven platforms and video making for brands while exploring other domains for which WittyFeed has developed marketing platforms.

Talking about his investment, Apurva Chamaria, VP & Head of Corporate Marketing, HCL Technologies said “We're presently in the midst of a major shift in which, increasingly, people are cord cutting and entertainment and news is being distributed on social networks and consumed on mobile devices. I believe WittyFeed will benefit from this paradigm shift and emerge as a leading media company of the 21rst century. Most brands need help in thinking and executing like a publisher and WittyFeed has emerged as the trusted partner in helping brands chart this journey. I have been witnessing WittyFeed grow from strength to strength in a very quick time by mastering content creation and viral distribution. I see a brilliant future for them."

Chamaria further added, “According to a Group M report released in February, advertising spent on digital media channels is expected to grow 30% to Rs 9,490 crore in 2017. With advertising spends shifting more and more to social & digital mediums, especially towards content & videos, WittyFeed is uniquely placed to attain huge interest from brands and their custodians.”

Chamaria has emerged as one of the top angel investors in the past 2 years has invested in approximately 27 companies in this span of time. Some of his investments include Innov8, Simulanis VR, Lucideus Tech, Chqbook, Ahhaa, etc.

WittyFeed was founded in September 2014 by Vinay Singhal, Shashank Vaishnav and Parveen Singhal from a small hostel room in Chennai. Headquartered at Indore, Madhya Pradesh, WittyFeed has reached from 0 to 250 million page views per month in a short span of 3 years. It has an audience reach of more than One Billion and gets 80 million unique readers and 160 million video views every month.

“WittyFeed is on path to become the world’s largest viral content marketing platform  where brands share their stories with their consumers and the distribution is taken care of by WittyFeed’s AI driven platform. We are delighted to receive great mentorship from Anand Chandrasekaran and other individual investors as investors, mentors, and advisors,” said Vinay Singhal, CEO & Co-founder, WittyFeed.

The startup is looking to expand further in the US market as it contributes 30% of company’s traffic. Some of the brands which have taken help of WittyFeed's viral capabilities are Zee Network, Tinder, Panasonic, Havmore Icecreams, ITM University, Hyundai, Coke, JIO, Dainik Bhsakar, V Resorts, Burger King, Dunkin Donuts, Droom, Lakeland, Exide life insurance, Career Launcher and 50 more.

"We are elated on getting acknowledged by some of the best entrepreneurs in the country, who have showed tremendous belief in our business model. We are really excited to welcome on board these able leaders who share the same vision as ours and can add great value to our company.” said Vinay.

WittyFeed is also an independent creator of virally successful content across 18 categories including travel, inspiration, relationships, health & fitness, food and celebrities.