Able Jobs, Hiring Platform for Entry-Level Talents, Raises $1.8 Mn in Funding from SAIF Partners, Y Combinator, Others

Neeraj Arora, Titan Capital and Firstcheque participated in the seed round

Able Jobs, a hiring platform for entry-level talent based out of Bangalore has raised a seed amount of $ 1.8 Mn from Saif Partners, Y Combinator, Neeraj Arora, Titan Capital and Firstcheque. Helping companies like WhiteHatJr, Bigbasket, Sharechat, hire entry level talent in the fields of sales, support and marketing, Able Jobs also offers skill development and online training courses for these young candidates.

The fresh raise will be used by the brand for acceleration of its product growth and expansion of its team. The company also plans to build state-of-the-art training products for companies to hire talent reliably and expand into adjacent sectors like FMCG, BFSI, etc.

Launched in May 2019, Able Jobs provides end to end hiring support to companies from finding the right candidate to getting talent deployed. Their app has rigorous online training programs where they pre-train candidates for job roles specific to companies. Post-training, companies interview candidates and then roll out offers as they deem fit. Able Jobs also helps companies acquire talent through social channels and gives them access to people beyond job portals.

Commenting on the fund raise, Able Jobs CEO Ravish Agrawal , said ,” Over the past decades companies have invested a lot of capital in hiring and training of entry level talent. We, at Able jobs, are focused on solving this by  partnering with companies and helping them hire trained professionals with a single click and no upfront  investment.”

“We are glad to have the SAIF team on our side,their deep networks in the ecosystem and years of expertise with startups will help us massively scale up our business.”

Announcing the investment, Deepak Gaur, MD, SAIF Partners India said, " We are extremely thrilled to partner with Ravish and his team who are catering to the flourishing bracket of job-seekers in the country. With the rising needs of such platforms in a post-Covid job market, we are confident that Ablejobs can catalyze the growth and development of the entry-level hiring ecosystem in our country while scaling up efficiently at the same time. Looking forward to partner with them in their next phase of growth."

With organisations prioritising skills more than college degrees, their talent requirements have become very dynamic. Using the Able Jobs platform, companies have seen 11X faster hiring and 4X deployable talent over the past few months.

About Able jobs

Started in May 2019, Able jobs has been started by Ravish Agrawal , Svatantra Kumar, Siddharth Srivastav, all of them having experience in the edtech space. Ravish is a graduate of IIT Kanpur and all the founders have done an edtech startup before starting Able Jobs. With an office in Bangalore and a team size of 10+ employees, their business objective is to help companies hire trained entry level talent.

Women Fashion Brand FabAlley's Parent Firm Raises ₹20.75 Cr Funding from SAIF Partners, India Quotient

High Street Essentials (HSE), the parent company of women's fashion brands FabAlley and Indya, on Saturday said it has raised Rs 20.75 crore in a fresh round of funding led by existing investors, SAIF Partners and India Quotient.

The pre-series C round involves a convertible note, which will be converted during the series C raise, a statement said.

The new round of funding has also seen participation from Abhishek Dalmia and several family offices, it added.

A convertible note is a short-term debt that converts into equity, typically in a future financing round in a startup.

The latest infusion of capital comes shortly after the company had raised Rs 8 crore in venture debt from Trifecta Capital in January this year. The company has raised over Rs 97 crore in equity funding and Rs 13 crore in venture debt.

"The new capital raised will be utilised for expanding the brands' D2C (digital to consumer) footprint with new initiatives such as a subscription-based shopping experience, and catalogue curation with AI-based recommendations based on customers' affinity and data mining," the statement said.

To address the current situation, the company has also ventured into new categories such as fashion masks, lounge-wear, and formal keyboard-up dressing options.

HSE's Indya brand has seen massive online growth internationally during the last fiscal year, which will be harnessed further by adding localised offers, currencies, and payment methods, the statement said.

Started in 2012 by Shivani Poddar and Tanvi Malik, HSE has scaled up its retail footprint in FY20 with 13 new Indya stores and five FabAlley stores, along with expanding both brands to over 400 shop-in-shops across the country.

"In the midst of this unprecedented global crisis, we are working hard to ensure that we leverage all our assets such as our nimble supply chain, data-led designing and sharp focus on customer experience so that HSE emerges as a leading fashion retail company in the industry," Poddar said.

HSE reported net revenue of Rs 90.2 crore in FY19, with a net profit of Rs 1.3 crore. PTI SR

Logistics Tech Firm Rivigo Raises $65 Mn from Existing Investors

Gurgaon-headquartered Rivigo, a technology-enabled logistics startup, has raised a funding of $65 million (~ Rs 445 Crore) in the ongoing series E round led by existing investors Warburg Pincus and SAIF Partners.

The company plans to utilise the money to further strengthen its technology and network coverage. Rivigo has a network coverage with more than 29000 pin codes in India.

After raising a $50 million equity financing in January last year, this is the second successive round of funding that has been led by the same two investors.

In the $150-160 billion Indian road freight market, Rivigo's technological prowess and relay trucking model has ensured the company creates significant value for the sector, says Deepak Garg, Founder and CEO, Rivigo.

The latest fund infusion is part of an ongoing Series E round, Rivigo said in its statement. It will use the proceeds to to further strengthen its technology and network coverage. The January 2018 capital raise was believed to have valued the five-year-old company at about $900-$950 million. It, however, did not disclose its valuation, post the closure of this latest round of funding.

Few days back, Mumbai-headquartered Freight Tiger, a B2B logistics technology startup, had raised $8 million in a funding round led by venture capital firm

Source - Economic Times

Chennai's Harvard and Stanford Alumni-founded Finwego Raises $1.7 Mn from SAIF Partners, HNIs

Chennai-headquartered, Finwego, a "loans-for-school-ecosystem" startup, has raised US$1.7 million ( ~₹ 11.84 crore) in a seed funding from SAIF Partners along with a group of HNIs and angels in a fresh round of funding.

Founded by a Harvard and a Stanford alumni -- Pavee Ramanisankar and Shiv Vadivelalagan, and incubated at the Harvard Innovation Labs, Finwego will use the freshly raised capital for expansion, growing a profitable book and strengthening tech and data infrastructure. Finwego will also focus on doubling its headcount within 3 months from a current team of 30 members.

Founded last year, Finwego is an education finance company in India addressing the entire spectrum of financial needs of K12 schools. The startup delivers tech-enabled lending products to stakeholders in the school ecosystem, including management, parents, teachers and vendors. It is currently operational in Tamil Nadu.

Finwego, which is planning to apply for an NBFC licence, offers personal loans to school teachers, education loans to parents/students for paying school fees, and working and growth capital loans to private schools.

Finwego has already on-boarded over 200 schools in the last six months and is planning to expand to more than 1,000 schools by the end of this financial year.

Finwego co-founder and CEO Shiv Vadivelalagan said in a statement to business daily, "Our aim here at Finwego is to deliver customised lending products for the rapidly growing private school education space in India. With the infusion of new funds, we are looking to build a high calibre team and digital infrastructure to support our robust growth plans."

The edu-finance startup aims to reach out to over 10,000 schools over the next five years and establish a pan-India presence.

Finwego is also the winner of the prestigious Harvard Innovation Challenge 2018 as well as the winners of Financial Health Award 2018 organized by Village Capital, a Washington, DC-based venture capital firm that finds, trains, and invests in early-stage ventures solving major global problems in agriculture, education, energy, financial inclusion, and health.

IAN makes it 3rd Exit in 2019 as Spinny Raises $13.2 Mn from SAIF and Accel Partners

Indian Angel Network, the single largest horizontal seed stage platform in India, has successfully received full exit from Spinny, a used car buying and selling platform. Valuedrive Technologies, which owns and operates used car retailing platform Spinny, has raised $13.2 million (about Rs 92 crore), from marquee investment firms SAIF Partners and Accel Partners.

The early investors from IAN, had invested only INR 1.67 crore – and have now a multiple of well over 3 times in just three years.

Commenting on the exit Digvijay Singh, COO IAN said, “IAN’s investment in Spinny was driven by the belief in the founding team’s vision and expertise, as well as its business model. With this exit, IAN investors are reaping the dividends of their faith in this high-potential venture, led by a team focused on execution in the auto space. IAN is delighted to have been a part of the growth that My Spinny has seen in the last three years and wish it all the very best in the future."

[caption id="attachment_131278" align="alignright" width="300"] Digvijay Singh[/caption]

IAN lead investor in Spinny, Hari Balasubramanian commented, “Startups are all about discovering the right business model. Since inception Spinny had gone through several tough and near death situations . But the team led by founder Niraj Singh were relentless and went on trying to discover new approaches to satisfy customers with a compelling value proposition . This ultimately led to product market fit for Spinny. Happy to see their growth and I am confident that this startup is the dark horse in this domain due to the efficient way they have deployed capital for customer development . We as angels did our job of getting them to this stage and it gives me a sense of sadness and joy since we are exiting 100 % from this investment with a reasonable multiple.”

[caption id="attachment_131279" align="alignright" width="300"] Hari Balasubramaniam[/caption]The Spinny IAN exit was facilitated by the Rs 13.12 crores investment from SAIF Partners and Accel, at a pre-money valuation of INR 125 crore. The development also marks the third successful exit for IAN investors in 2019, retaining its position as the top seed investment platform in India. IAN had previously secured multi-fold exits from Noida-based online women’s fashion brand FabAlley.com and a Bengaluru-based start-up TagBox.

Indian Angel Network is India’s first and world’s largest business angel network with close to 500 members across the world, comprising the who’s who of successful entrepreneurs and dynamic CEOs. With investors from 12 countries, IAN’s operates from 7 locations, including cities in India and UK. The network is sector agnostic and has funded start-ups across 17 sectors in India and 7 other countries, helping breed global footprint companies. IAN has been giving excellent cash exits year-on-year to its investor-members. Some of its marquee investee companies include, Druva, Box8, Sapience Analytics, WOW Momos, Faballey, Consure amongst many others.

Indian Angel Network has been a pioneer in the seed and early stage investing. It has now launched a ₹450 Crores VC fund making it now, the single largest platform for seed & early stage, where entrepreneurs can raise from Rs. 25 lakhs to Rs. 50 crores (with co investors), thus making IAN the platform of choice – for both entrepreneurs & investors!

$5.75 Mn Tax Scam Unearthed at Beverage Firm Co-owned by SAIF Partners

Vadodara, Gujarat-based Manpasand Beverages Ltd (MBL), known for MangoSip - a mango drink brand, and OXY Sip - a packaged drinking water, is suddenly in a centre of controversy as Central GST Commissionerate of Vadodara,Gujarat has unearthed a ₹ 40 crore (~ US$5.75 Mn ) goods and services tax (GST) scam in the company, which is backed by private equity firm SAIF Partners, which hold 25% stake in MBL.

According to Business Standard, citing CGST commissionerate sources, MBL allegedly created and showed sales and purchases across more than 30 fake units.

In a latest, MBL founder Dhirendra Singh, his brother Hashvardhan Singh, Managing Director Abhishek Singh and chief financial officer Paresh Thakkar were arrested after a raid on May 23 by the Central GST Commissionerate Vadodara for GST fraud amounting to ₹40 crore.

It was in 2011, when the private equity firm SAIF Partners reportedly picked up a 25 percent stake in MBL for Rs 45-50 crore, with an earnings multiple of 30.

The report further said that ever since Deloitte resigned as auditor for Manpasand Beverages has been in controversy, which is then eventually came out open when top management executives of MBL were arrested cementing the speculations.

Established in 1998, by current Chairman and Managing Director Dhirendra Singh, MBL boasted its presence in rural and tier-2 and 3 markets when its multinational competitors were ruling the metros and top cities.

MBL counts celebrities as its brands' endorsement adverts. While Bollywood actor Sunny Deol is brand endorser of 'MangoSip', actress Tapsi Pannu endorses its 'MangoSip' brand. MBL's ready-to-drink oral rehydration salts (ORS) sports drink is endorsed by boxing champ Mary Kom.



By 2018, the company was congratulating itself on reaching out to these markets with a distribution strength of 600,000 outlets.

"MBL was also on its way to setting up its fourth plant in the country. Its manufacturing plants in Vadodara, Varanasi and Sri City are either operational or under construction," said the report.

Usually the cases one comes across show companies running real units, but acquiring fake invoices here and there to claim input tax credit (ITC). But in case of MBL, it has been found that the company set up several fake units and across the country at that. Real purchase and sale transactions were then shown with values inflating with each transaction in order to claim a cumulatively large sum of input tax credit," a source said.

The company allegedly showed inter-unit transactions worth over Rs 300 crore wherein ITC would come up to Rs 40 crore. Government sources said that these transactions were found to have taken place in 2018-19.

In this case, MBL allegedly showed inter-unit transactions worth Rs 300 crore, which led to an accumulation of input tax credit (ITC) of Rs 40 crore. According to CGST commissionerate sources, the transactions took place on several occasions in 2018-19, beginning three-four months ago.

Independent chartered accountants and corporate law experts who have followed the case said the circular trading involved one of the real units showing a sales transaction to a fake unit, which is then followed by a string of similar transactions, adding a slight margin at each stage and eventually landing up as a purchase transaction by a real unit of MBL.

“The real unit which shows purchase in the end can now claim tax credit on the inflated value at each stage. Mostly, it is even difficult for auditors to find out such a long trail of 30 fake units because there are no RoC (Registrar of Companies) records. Also, there is no law in the country that prohibits such kinds of circular trading. Only CGST intelligence can smell it when they follow the trail on their system and find that these are similar or even same transactions shown again and again,” said an independent corporate law expert.

For SAIF, which is investor in companies like Book My Show, MakeMyTrip, Paytm and FirstCry among others, MBL is not its first portfolio firm that came into controversy as earlier an another SAIF Partners-backed Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services (IL&FS) came in to controversy for alleged fraud and causing wrongful loss to the troubled infrastructure lender.

Last month, a former vice chairman of IL&FS, Hari Sankaran, was arrested by Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO). He is accused of granting loans to entities that were not credit-worthy or declared as non-performing accounts causing loss to the company and its creditors.

Coincidentally, IL&FS also had Deloitte as its auditor at that time and according to SFIO the initial probe revealed the existence of major lapses in Deloitte’s audit of IL&FS subsidiary.

Gurgaon-based Travel tech startup Airblack Raises $1.5 Mn from SAIF Partners

Gurgaon-based Airblack, an end-to-end travel ecosystem for the new-age independent millennial travelers, which is yet to be launched, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding from SAIF Partners, a Hong Kong-based Asia-focussed venture and growth capital fund.

The startup will utilise the seed capital for launching its product, ramping up its traveler community and hiring of a core team.

Founded this year, by Pulkit Pujara (IIT Delhi) and Videt Jaiswal (NSIT), Airblack is essentially a social-travel commerce startup that is connecting users with verified network of power travelers and travel influencers on a personal chat for exchanging recommendations around their travel plans.

Airblack, which claims to have helped more than 1000 travellers with their travel plans, leverages WhatsApp and Instagram ecosystem to connect travelers with verified network of power travelers and travel influencers.

Notably, both Pulkit and Videt are former executives at SAIF Partners. Pulkit was also AVP of Operations at online grocer Grofers. Videt has earlier worked at Boston Consulting Group and co-founded a content startup, which he exited eventually

Over one-third of US $600 billion that is spent on international travel in Asia is spent by millennials. Over two-thirds of travelers in this generation plan and book independently and Airblack is leveraging on this generational shift in the consumer travel space in Asia.

"Lot of content on platforms such as Instagram and travel blogs has made travellers more confident to travel but at the same time, it has also created a problem of information overload, that leads to anxiety and confusion. We saw there is a strong social need in travellers here to talk to other travellers before taking purchase decisions, and an aversion to talk to travel agents because they are not relatable to this audience. We are focused on creating a strong trust layer in this category,” says Videt, co-founder, Airblack.

Mayank Khanduja, Principal, SAIF Partners, said in a statement, "Over $600 billion is spent on international travel in Asia, and we see India's international travel market at an inflection point already. We strongly believe that a large wave of the new consumer demand in travel will be led by people who like to have independence in planning their trips. With increasing disposable income, spend on international travel will go up. And these users will look for social validation online before deciding on a high involvement purchase like travel. We were impressed by the team's unique insights and community-driven approach to cater to this traveler."

SAIF Partners, which manages over $4 billion in assets across India & China, has earlier invested Rs 60 crore in High Street Essentials (HSE), which owns women-centric fashion brands - FabAlley and Indya, in December last year.

SAIF is also known for backing Paytm, MakeMyTrip, Meesho, ShareChat, Swiggy and Urbanclap at an early-stage. Besides MakeyMyTrip, SAIF has invested in other travel startups such as Treebo and Travel Triangle.

Women-centric Online Fashion Brands Faballey & Indya Raises ₹60 Cr from SAIF Partners

Noida-based High Street Essentials (HSE), which owns women-centric fashion brands, FabAlley and Indya, have raised Rs 60 crore in a Series B funding from SAIF Partners.

This round of funding also includes a partial secondary share sale by Indian Angel Network (IAN), which was early investor in the startup. IAN had invested undisclosed amount as seed fund in Faballey, in November 2013.

With latest round of funding, HSE, which is led by women founders, has raised a total of about $11.3 million in funding over four rounds, including this one. The latest is the third round funding by the startup, which last raised its Series A funding from India Quotient in October 2016 and a round of debt from Trifecta Capital earlier this year.

The startup intends to use the fresh funding towards increasing distribution, product expansion, brand-building and strengthening its technology.

Founded in 2012, by Tanvi Malik and Shivani Poddar, who quit their high-paying jobs in Titan Industries, Unilever and Avendus Capital, HSE had started FabAlley as a highly curated women-centered accessories only store. It then grown to become brand of globally trendy apparel and accessories both, and all of which designed in-house.

In 2016, HSE launched 'Indya', a second by company that offers contemporary Indian wear with modern and distinctive Indo-western elements for the women-centric market.

The company claims to have turned profitable in FY18 with gross sales of Rs 80 crore and said it was on track to close FY19 at Rs 150 crore, while remaining Ebitda positive.

“The capital infusion will help us scale our offline presence rapidly from 15 exclusive outlets and 120 shop-in-shops to 50 and 300, respectively, by the end of FY20. We will invest in Athleisure and our plus size brand, Curve. We will also look at amplifying our brands” said Shivani Podda.

Tanvi Malik added “Our goal is to capture both online and offline growth opportunities by leveraging our channel-agnostic approach through phygital store experiences, virtual fitting rooms, seamlessly merged forward and reverse logistics – all aimed at benefitting from the strategic advantages of both channels, while minimising their inherent disadvantages.”

Recent Funding Led By SAIF Partner

SAIF Partners, which is a Hong Kong-based venture and growth capital fund, had recently led a $3.3 million Series A round of funding of IIT Madras incubated Internet of Things (IoT) Startup, DeTect Technologies, in last month.

In October, SAIF had also led a $3.1 million funding of Meesho, a Bengaluru-based social e-commerce startup backed by Y Combinator. Prior to this, in September this year, SAIF led a Series A round of funding worth $2 million of Sensehawk, a Bangalore and California-based startup that performs data analysis from autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Drones.

Source - Financial Express

Chennai-based IoT Startup DeTect Technologies Raises $3.3 Mn from SAIF Partners, Others

Chennai-headquartered and IIT Madras incubated Internet of Things (IoT) Startup, DeTect Technologies, has raised $3.3 million ( ~ INR 23.53 crores) in Series A round of fundind led by SAIF Partners. Bharat Innovation Fund, Axilor Ventures, BlueHill Capital Pvt Ltd and a few angels from the Keiretsu Forum have also participated in the round. Currently operating in Chennai, Bangalore, Jamnagar and the UK, this latest infusion of growth capital will be used for international expansion, for building manufacturing capability for mass production of their patented technology products GUMPS and NOCTUA and to also supplement the core R&D focus of the company.

The startup had earlier raised an undisclosed amount of funding from IIM Ahmedabad's CIIE, Axilor Ventures and angel network Keiretsu Forum in August last year.

Focusing on developing patented technologies, currently DeTect Technologies has two products in their portfolio, the services of which they are looking at expanding to other countries. Both the products, GUMPS and NOCTUA, are aimed at increasing the productivity of industries at large thereby increasing efficiency and reducing the opportunities for manual errors.

GUMPS, the first sensor in the world, that can monitor pipeline thickness change in real time with the help of machine learning algorithms increases the efficiency of the inspection process. A unique feature of the product is that it can even operate at temperatures of upto 300 deg Celsius.

NOCTUA, and industrial drone, tailor made for process industry inspections,conducts automated visual and thermal inspection of industrial infrastructures and significantly reduces maintenance and inspection efforts including scaffoldings, etc. The product has been built out to serve process industries as a market segment.

Both products have seen tremendous adoption in the Oil and Gas markets in India.

Daniel Raj David, CEO and Co-Founder, DeTect Technologies said, “ Our goal here at DeTect Technologies is to leverage high end engineering talent, build deep technology, design cutting edge infrastructure and create high end patented solutions for asset risk monitoring and also estimating their life predictions. By developing sensor technology, drone technology, image processing and machine learning algorithms here in India, our technologies are focused on improving operational efficiencies for industries at large by helping them enhance monitoring and increase safety and accuracy."

[caption id="attachment_127358" align="aligncenter" width="738"] DeTect Technologies founding team [/caption]

“Developing patented technologies to perform intelligent asset monitoring to perform risk evaluation and estimated life prediction for improving safety and efficiency is at the core of our philosophy. We are happy to have received support from SAIF Partners and additional support from our existing investors Bharat Innovation Fund, Axilor Ventures, BlueHill Capital Pvt Ltd and angels from the Keiretsu Forum as it solidifies our resolve in revolutionizing the industrial landscape. Our growing partnership with SAIF will not only help us with with an expanded capital base but will also propel the company’s ambitions to cater to global Oil and Gas Markets and take indigenous core technology built in India to the rest of the world.”

Announcing the investment Mridul Arora, Managing Director, SAIF Partners said, “We are very excited to partner with the Detect team as they bring a rare combination of deep domain expertise, global market opportunity and high entrepreneurial energy. Global oil and gas majors have flocked to Detect to take advantage of Detect’s asset monitoring and inspection solutions and we’re confident that the team will continue to expand its global footprint. The SAIF team is proud to support the ambitions of deep tech Indian startups such as Detect."

Ashwin Raguraman, Founding Partner, Bharat Innovation fund said, “Having been closely involved with Detect for over a year, it is incredible to observe the pace at which Detects solution has grown, from a raw promising technology, to a couple of full fledged world class products that are being consumed by the biggest corporations in the world. Detect is tackling a problem that others havent even come close to solving and it is fascinating to have been and continue to be a part of their evolutionary story.”

The company has a 80 member team, with 50 permanent employees with operations in Chennai, Bangalore, Jamnagar and the UK (London and Aberdeen). Detect is looking to double its employee count this year. They currently have orders within India and are also working with four other countries-USA, UK, Portugal and Singapore.

The concept of Detect started in IIT Madras in 2013 and was founded by alumni Tarun Mishra, Daniel Raj David, Harikrishnan AS, Karthik R, and professor Krishnan Balasubramanian. The company was incorporated on Feb 23rd 2016 and had a vision to become a global leader in asset integrity and monitoring solutions, in the space of Risk Analysis and Remaining Life Estimation to target continuous and safe industry operations. The core philosophy of the company is to build globally patented hardware and software solutions in the space of sensor building, manufacturing, IOT, robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Computer Vision. IIT Madras being a hub of hardware technology inventions has proved to be a great base to build the initial R&D team.

Drone based Data Solutions Startup SenseHawk Raises $2 Mn from SAIF Partners

Data solutions startup Sensehawk Technologies Pvt. Ltd has raised $2 million (Rs 13.6 crore) in a Series A round led by venture capital and growth equity investment firm SAIF Partners. Besides SAIF, few angel investors also participated in the round.

Bangalore and California-based Sensehawk aims to revolutionize Infrastructure and Mining space using data from autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and Drones.

The Series A round of investment will be utilized for business development and engineering. Expansion of business outside of India, US and Australia will be a key focus in addition to strengthening of existing contracts.

SenseHawk is attempting to transform the way asset enterprises operate by using AI and ML coupled with data collected from autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other novel sensing platforms. Its solutions combine different kinds of UAVs, sensors, data processing and planning chains to create decision making tools that drive productivity in energy and infrastructure industries.

Swarup Mavanoor, Co-founder and CEO, SenseHawk said, “Our goal is to digitize infrastructure asset industries through the creation of a scalable AI driven platform that combines new age sensor data and expert knowledge to deliver insights to users across functions. With large investments into new infrastructure and strong downward pressure on investment returns, combating process inefficiency with new sensing technologies and intelligent software has become a critical requirement. We are addressing exactly this requirement with an initial focus on the Solar Industry.”

“We are happy to have gained valuable support from SAIF as it adds a lot of credibility to our business model. The expanded capital base will allow SenseHawk to focus on business development, expand geographically and diversify the depth of solutions offered to enterprises,” he added.

Founded in 2016, by Swarup Mavanoor and Rahul Sankhe, SenseHawk is building a suite of SaaS tools that work to streamline processes across the life-cycle of infrastructure assets. Its solutions work with the latest data acquisition tools including UAVs, IoT enabled devices and SCADA systems to provide asset owners, developers, investors, lenders, EPC contractors and technical teams with timely and super accurate information.

Announcing the investment, Mayank Khanduja, Principal, SAIF Partners said, “We are thrilled to partner with Sensehawk in their quest to build a unique data solutions platform that leverages computer vision and artificial intelligence. We are impressed at the upside that Sensehawk solution brings to the multi billion dollar Solar industry today and will soon do the same for other industries. As the solar industry attracts more investment, we believe that Swarup, Rahul and their team will be at the forefront of building an intelligent analytics platform that allows asset owners to maximize asset performance, and we feel excited to work with them on this next phase of growth.”

SenseHawk provides easy to use end to end aerial data solutions for the Infrastructure and Mining Industry. From managing the autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to subsequent data management and analysis tools, the platform provides an end to end solution to enterprises so that they get the highest quality of data for planning large scale projects.

The company has a 20-member team with operations in India, US and Australia and more than 20 leading corporates as their customers.

Source - IndiaInfoline

Social E-Commerce Startup Meesho Raises $3.1 Mn From Investors Led By SAIF Partners

Bengaluru-based social e-commerce startup Meesho has raised $3.1 million from investors led by SAIF Partners in a fresh round of funding. Existing investors Y Combinator and Venture Highway also participated in the round.

The startup will use the freshly raised funds to hire for its tech and business operation teams, CEO Vidit Aatrey said. The company is also looking to scale up its platform by bringing in more resellers though community engagement and referrals.

This funding has made startup's total funding to $3.7 million. In May 2016 Meesho had raised $350,000 from angel investors including in convertible debt.

Founded in 2015 by IIT-Delhi alumni Sanjeev Barnwal and Vidit Aatrey, Meesho is a mobile-first e-commerce platform for the specific needs of small businesses in India. Businesses can create an online shop within seconds, share on WhatsApp and Facebook, keep customers updated with new products, get new customers leads in real-time and collect payments over chat easily.

Meesho connects suppliers to a network of resellers largely comprising housewives, who then use channels such as WhatsApp and social media platforms Facebook and Instagram to promote these products within their social circles. It has about 20,000 resellers and more than 1,000 suppliers on its marketplace, mainly in the categories of fashion, lifestyle and home, and kitchen.

A reseller earns 10-20% commission on each transaction. Mukul Arora, managing director at SAIF Partners said to Times of India, "This is a very India specific opportunity with strong tailwinds, and has potential to change how long tail products are sold in India."

Meesho has partnered with third party logistics players to enable deliveries. About half of its orders are fulfilled through cash on delivery, 25% through payment gateways, for which it has tied up with Razorpay, while the rest are done through mobile wallets.

WhatsApp is estimated to have over 100 million users. As the country’s most popular app, WhatsApp is unparalleled as a distribution channel for selling online or retaining customers, despite being largely ill-suited to the role. That’s where Meesho, a startup in Y Combinator’s latest batch, is hoping to change things and empower WhatsApp sellers.

The number of Internet users in India is expected to reach 450-465 million by June, up 4-8% from 432 million in December 2016. The report also points out that 77% of urban users and 92% of rural users consider mobile as the primary device for accessing the Internet, largely driven by availability and affordability of smartphones.

Moreover, in India not everyone has desktop or laptop but smartphone with WhatsApp as the most popular app which is estimated to have over 100 million users. As the country’s most popular app, WhatsApp is unparalleled as a distribution channel for selling online or retaining customers, despite being largely ill-suited to the role. That’s where Meesho is hoping to change things and empower WhatsApp sellers.

Unacademy Raises $11.5 Mn In Series B Funding Led By Sequoia India, SAIF Partners

Learning platform Unacademy today announced the close of a $11.5 million Series B round of funding led by Sequoia India and SAIF Partners. Existing investors and angels including Nexus Venture Partners and Blume Ventures also participated in the round.

Unacademy will utilize the funding to accelerate its product and technology as well as scale to other categories including personality development, new languages and job interviews. The company will also significantly invest in producing its own knowledge based content with its top educators on the platform.

Commenting on the development, Gaurav Munjal, CEO and co-founder, Unacademy said, “Our vision is to build the world’s largest online knowledge repository by empowering great educators. With the backing of Sequoia and SAIF, we are poised to significantly gain momentum and create the first global education technology product out of India.”

Unacademy is an online learning platform that empowers educators to create courses on various subjects. The platform currently has more than 50,000 lessons online and over 1 million registered users. It is also one of the largest education channels on YouTube India with 1 million subscribers.

The platform’s educators range from influencers like Dr Kiran Bedi to teachers in smaller towns and cities such as Dhiraj Singh Chouhan in Jagdalpur and Yasmin Gill in Panchkula.

“Sequoia India is inspired by Unacademy's vision to create a global platform that enables educators to create content and engage with learners. The missionary team at Unacademy is off to a tremendous start, achieving rapid early adoption and Sequoia is thrilled to be a part of their journey,” said Shailendra Singh, Managing Director, Sequoia Capital (India) Singapore Pte. Ltd.

Unacademy was founded by Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini, Hemesh Singh and Sachin Gupta. Gaurav and Hemesh were previously running Flatchat which was acquired by CommonFloor in 2014. Roman, 26, is a doctor from AIIMS and one of the youngest people to clear the prestigious Indian Civil Services Examination. To follow his passion, he quit his administrative services post as Asst. Collector of Jabalpur to start Unacademy.

Recently, the company added billionaire and serial entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia to the board.

Hyperlocal Sharing App Pulse Raises $500k in Pre-Series A Round from SAIF Partners

Pulse, a social networking app enabling users to stay connected with college/school communities around them in a fun, visual way has raised $500k in funding from SAIF Partners. Pulse provides users a full-screen visual experience of streams of colleges around them, with customized stickers to make the experience more fun and engaging! With the freshly raised funds, Pulse aims to expand its presence to other cities including Pune, Bangalore, Mumbai, Chandigarh, Manipal, Chennai, Hyderabad, etc and to ramp up its technology team.

Pulse was co-founded by IIT Roorkee alumnus Karthik Vaidyanath, and Prakhar Khanduja, in late October 2016. The core idea behind the app was to create a platform for the millennials, where they would not only consume content that is locally relevant to them, but also create and share it with a very geo-specific community.

The main USP of Pulse is that it gives its users access to hyper-local content around them, and a platform to contribute to & share it with a wider group within college, and across college communities.

“Typical broadcasting social networks like Facebook & Twitter have limited users posting daily as it’s a public broadcast to the world with limited privacy. Contrary to broadcasting, through our elaborate on-ground market research we realized that by narrowcasting to the relevant audience within & across nearby colleges, and giving the content hyper-local relevance, it greatly boosted content interactions as well as significantly reduced the inhibition of users for content creation. Hyperlocal social networking & narrowcasting is the next wave of social networking.”, said Karthik. Pulse has almost 30% of its users posting daily, with a DAU/MAU ratio of ~25%.

The ability to add highly relatable locally-relevant stickers to the images has been received extremely well by the college communities. Moreover, the app has been designed to perfectly suit the Asian millenial target market - It utilizes minimal internet bandwidth and one can view content as well as post completely offline.

“The inception of Pulse happened when my nephew told me how he misses out on events in his college. Thats where we went on ground for 3 months and met over 5000 kids from various colleges and schools across India to understand how they think. Then we got a few of them to work with us for a few weeks and we collectively came out with all the features with them. This exercise also showed us how users today quickly prefer adding a sticker to their pictures to express their emotions over typing a caption, which itself is a huge market. And with the feedback we’ve got, Pulse has made content creation more intuitive for users. Pulse is the first consumer app in India which is made by the college kids and for the college kids,” said Prakhar Khanduja, Cofounder, Pulse.

“College & school students in India did not have yet have a platform that was built ground-up for them and this had created a white space for a product to emerge. We really like the way the team has gone about building a platform that provides young users relevant content in the form of full-screen multimedia rich stories, which is something they understand the best,” said Mayank Khanduja, SAIF Partners.

With an on-ground team of just two people, in a very short duration Pulse has managed to rope in most of the major colleges around the Delhi-NCR area through their unique community program. Pulse aims to be the de-facto app for millenials to know what’s happening in their college communities around them.

Pulse had raised $500K seed from SAIF Partners a few months back. With Pulse getting great reviews throughout colleges in Delhi, the next phase is to scale up across colleges outside Delhi/NCR including Pune, Bangalore, Mumbai, Chandigarh, Manipal, etc.

Pulse, in the previous round of funding, had raised capital from eminent Angel Investors like Rajan Anandan, Rajesh Sawhney, Anupam Mittal, Uday Shankar (CEO, StarTV), Anand Chandrasekaran, Amit Ranjan, etc. They’re currently in talks with investors in India, China & the US for a larger round.

Image : Prakhar Khanduja, Cofounder, Pulse

Indian Language Social Platform ShareChat Raises $4M in Series A Round

ShareChat, the Indian language social platform, has closed a $4 million Series A round of funding, led by Lightspeed India Partners, and from existing investors, SAIF Partners and India Quotient. The funding round also saw participation from Venture Highway (through VH Capital). Sharechat is building the largest social content network in India with a focus on small town users and vernacular content.ShareChat is the only platform available to a large audience coming to the internet for the first time, in India.

“Our core focus is to become the most essential non-chat social app for a first-time internet user, whether it is through local language content or through infotainment services which are relevant to them.They are hunting for things to do that are utilitarian (payments, commerce, etc.) – there’s plenty of choice here from Flipkart to Ola to Justdial to PayTM. They are also hunting for ways to kill time (TV, games, books, magazines, news, music, social media, ...) Most of what is in this "kill time" category is the traditional entertainment & media industry rejigging their content for mobile consumption and distributing this one-way through aggregators or directly. Examples would be Saavn or Hotstar or InShorts or Youtube. Almost no one has created or exposed new content for the average Indian common man or woman. This is what Sharechat is doing” says Farid Ahsan, Co-founder & CEO, ShareChat.

As the name suggests, ShareChat allows users to create, discover and share content with each other much like people do on Tumblr and Instagram. Users can follow other users who are either a content creator or a friend on the platform for regular updates, much-like most other social networks. The key differentiator for ShareChat, however,is the primary action of sharing.

“Our audience is ever hungry for both consuming localised content and expressing their creativity and opinions to the right audience, something that was not very easy for them until now, even with existing social networks. We believe that the Indian user is very typical in his/her needs and this gives a local player a closeness to user problems when compared with global social networking giants like Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Snapchat. A lot of our effort goes into understanding the audience and their needs through experiments. It is a lot like returning to an earlier time of internet usage, pretty close to how we were when we came to the internet for the first time in the early 2000s.” says Ankush Sachdeva, Co-founder and CPO, who has just returned from a survey trip to Alwar villages in Rajasthan.

Dev Khare, from Lightspeed India Partners, says, “ShareChat is poised to be a big problem solver for the largely-ignored mass market of India. The audience definitely needs a product which is relevant to their mindspace and we believe ShareChat balances this need of a content+social discovery platform in the best fashion.”

ShareChat is available in 6 languages, namely, Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, Gujarati and Punjabi. Tamil and Bengali are currently in private beta and will be shortly made available for all users. The app has been downloaded 3.5 million times, with roughly 2 million active users on the platform. At a daily level, 1 million content pieces get shared per day from ShareChat.

Mayank Khanduja, from SAIF Partners, says “ShareChat is in a very unique position in the Indian market today. We’ve worked closely with this team for the last one year and the way they have leveraged technology is outstanding.”

ShareChat was started by Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Singh and Ankush Sachdeva, right after graduating from IIT-K. The fact that the founders hail from small towns has helped their cause in making their first gut impressions right. ShareChat started as a content repository app for sharing on Whatsapp, and has now evolved into a full-fledged social network.

“When we invested 2 years ago, we just had a team and an idea to build a social network for the masses. From the days of ideating in our office, the team has come a long way and has grown along with the business. We rate them as the best product team we have worked with, especially their approach of blending data with experiments." says Anand Lunia, from India Quotient, the first investor in ShareChat.

“We are excited about the product that ShareChat is building. We have always believed that a homegrown social product, built for the aam aadmi in vernacular, addresses a big opportunity in India. ” says Samir Sood, founder, Venture Highway, which is advised by Neeraj Arora, the Global Business Head of Whatsapp.

“It is always a great feeling to be backed by good investors who understand the space. But procurement of capital does not ensure success of a business, though being the lifeline considering we have a limited focus on revenue. The battle only goes uphill from here,” says Bhanu Singh, Co-founder and CTO, ShareChat.

“The fresh round of funds will be employed majorly for going deep into the vernacular ecosystem. Having multi-lingual interfaces is just not enough. We have literally just touched the surface of our target audience. These are early adopters. A lot of work is required on our part to make ShareChat a household brand, digging deep into the user base, and to bring even more interesting infotainment and utilities for our ever-expanding Indian market,” concludes Farid.

Mobile Social Gaming Company PlaySimple Gets $4M from SAIF Partners & IDG Ventures

SAIF Partners, the leading venture capital firm with over $4B under management, along with IDG Ventures have announced a Series A funding deal with PlaySimple, a mobile social gaming company. PlaySimple has secured $4 million from the venture capital firms and plans to infuse the fresh funds in expanding its team and developing new mobile titles that are targeted at global audiences across various casual gaming genres.

PlaySimple, in early 2015, had raised a total of $500,000 in its seed round from IDG Ventures. The mobile social gaming company was incepted in 2014 by four founders - Siddharth Jain, Preeti Reddy, Suraj Nalin and Siddhanth Jain. PlaySimple delivers addictive and engaging mobile games in the trivia, word and puzzle categories. The start-up successfully made it into the Google Launchpad Accelerator Program that empowers founders with unique ideas and guides start-ups through mentorship and equity-free support. Till date, PlaySimple has released two games, GuessUp and WordTrek which have garnered over 10 million downloads on Android and iOS.

Mayank Khanduja, Principal at SAIF Partners, said, “Gaming is a huge market internationally and a very competitive one. We have known the PlaySimple team for over a year and have been amazed by the growth they have got in a very short period of time. Their approach is quite unique and we have a high confidence in their success.”

Karthik Prabhakar, Director and Head - Fundraising at IDG Ventures India, said, “Although gaming is considered be a hit-and-miss business, PlaySimple's formula on building games and their highly data driven/analytical approach have allowed them to be successful. We believe that PlaySimple will emerge as one of the big product companies outside India. IDGVI has increased the investment in the company and will be working with them very closely to scale their business."

Siddharth Jain, Co-Founder at PlaySimple, said, “PlaySimple makes highly addictive games for the global casual gaming audience. Our rigorous data-driven approach has delivered strong results so far, and has the potential to make us a dominant player in the global casual gaming space. We’ve grown fast so far with a small but a sharp team; we’re actively recruiting top notch talent across engineering, design, analytics and product management functions to fuel our growth over the next couple of years."

As smartphone technology continues to evolve and emerge as the preferred platform for gaming, surpassing other content delivery platforms, PlaySimple is poised to become one of the most sought-after mobile social gaming companies going forward. With an ever-growing consumer appetite for mobile gaming content and the fresh round of funds, the company is set to further cement its rising popularity amongst gaming aficionados.

Language App ShareChat Bags $1.35M from SAIF Partners and India Quotient

SAIF Partners, the leading venture capital firm with over $4B under management has invested $1.35 million in ShareChat, the vernacular social network. The capital infusion is a part of ShareChat’s seed round of funding which also involved participation from existing investors, India Quotient. The company will leverage the funds raised towards ramping up its tech infrastructure to cater to its constantly growing user base and to reach out to more people across India with a variety of content formats.

Besides the validation that ShareChat has received from top institutional investors, it was also applauded for its approach when it was selected as one of the 6 startups invited for the second batch of Google Launchpad Accelerator program from India, which is a six-month mentorship program.

ShareChat has built a first-of-its-kind social networking platform for India’s vernacular language users, available in 4 Indian languages, namely Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam and Telugu which will be followed by many more. It has already crossed 1 million downloads, and at half a million monthly active users, it has been consistently growing at 10% week on week. ShareChat was started by three IIT Kanpur alumni, Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Singh and Ankush Sachdeva in 2015.

Farid Ahsan, CEO, ShareChat, said, “It’s highly motivating for us to get backed by SAIF Partners. ShareChat has started growing virally now and every new user strengthens the platform even further. It’s encouraging for us to see how our users have been responding and creating a really diverse variety in vernacular content on ShareChat. With the latest fund raise we plan to strengthen our technology to serve the increasing traffic on ShareChat and expand into more languages and content types.”

Mayank Khanduja, Principal, SAIF Partners, said, “We’re very confident about team ShareChat’s understanding of what we see as a massive market opportunity. Moreover, we feel it’s the best team for the job as the co-founders have strong technical backgrounds and a highly data driven approach. The platform is powerful enough to solve the content and the social networking needs of the growing Indian smartphone users.”

Indian Internet users living in non-metro cities find it very difficult to discover content and information, especially first-time internet users, owing to poor network connections on smartphones and the native language barrier thanks to the English-first flavour of apps. These are the gaps that ShareChat seeks to plug and with this round of funding it aims to make social networking in the vernacular accessible for a larger number of users across India.

ShareChat currently allows users to follow each other, create and find content in their preferred language, and share to chat platforms like Whatsapp. ShareChat started as a content sharing tool for Whatsapp and witnessed traction of 1 million shares a week.It has now made rapid strides towards building its full-fledged social platform. Already 5 million connections have been made on ShareChat and the rapid success of user generated content is a very exciting sign that ShareChat users were desperately looking for a platform like this.

SAIF Partners Invests Rs 4.7 Cr in Mobile Crowdsourcing Platform Playment in Pre-series A Round

SAIF Partners, a leading venture capital firm with over $4B under management, has announced a pre-series A funding deal with Playment.  SAIF Partners has invested 4.7 Crores INR  into the Bangalore-based venture that enables large companies to crowdsource completion of process oriented tasks that are typically done by in-house or outsourced teams (BPOs).

Playment will use the funds raised to lay the foundation of a world class engineering and product team, along with scaling up deployments in all clients.

Playment is a two sided marketplace that helps large companies bring cost-effectiveness and speed to their operations, and on the other side helps smartphone users supplement their income on the go. To the company’s credit, it has already been able to supplement monthly income of several thousand people by over a third and that explains how the company has acquired tens of thousands of 100% organic downloads.

To start with, Playment is working with Indian e-commerce companies to enable completion of micro-tasks such as meta tagging of photos, product categorization, clean up of product profiles etc. For eg: Merchants bulk upload apparel catalogues, and then a person has to do up to 15 quality inspections on each and every SKU submitted before its gets published.

Siddharth Mall, CEO, Playment said, “We strongly believe in the power of the sharing economy. The world has seen how the likes of Airbnb & Uber have created a new source of income and we want to be right up there with them.”

“We’re building a platform where humans & machines can work together to solve problems which were previously unsolvable at scale. To enable this, we are using cutting edge technology, to build systems that can provide an awesome experience to thousands of our players who play on the app throughout the day. To be able to do that, we would be investing a lot in building a world class product and engineering team.”

Mayank Khanduja, Principal, SAIF Partners, said, “We’re very excited about team Playment’s discovery of what we believe to be a massive market opportunity . Moreover, we feel it’s the best team for the job as the co-founders have strong technical backgrounds and first hand knowledge of the space via their Flipkart experience. While the platform is still in early stages, it’s power lies in the ability to generate direct and recurring cash earnings for anyone with a smartphone within minutes of coming on the platform. India is a fast growing emerging market with lots of ambitious people and we believe the masses would get addicted to Playment. “

Incepted in August 2015, Playment was launched in November 2015 by IIT-Kharagpur alumni Siddharth Mall & Akshay Lal, along with IIT-Guwahati alumnus Ajinkya Malasane.

SAIF began partnering with entrepreneurs in India in 2002 and has backed over 40 companies since then including MakeMyTrip, JustDial, PayTM, BookMyShow, and Urban Ladder. SAIF’s financial services portfolio spans across established businesses such as NSE, Edelweiss and Karur Vysya Bank as well as emerging tech-enabled ventures such as Capital Float.

SAIF Partners Invests $1M in Online Emotional Wellness & Counselling Platform YourDOST in Pre-series A Round

SAIF Partners, a leading venture capital firm with over $4B under management, has announced a pre-series A funding deal with YourDOST.  SAIF Partners has invested $1 million into the Bangalore-based venture which offers online counselling and emotional wellness support to users to bolster their mental health. YourDOST has raised a total of $1.2 million in the round with the repeat participation of seven angel investors- Venk Krishnan (NuVentures), Subba rao Telidevara (NuVentures), Phanindra Sama (Redbus), Aprameya (Taxi4Sure), Paula Mariwala (Seedfund), Vibhu Garg (Unicommerce), Gaurav Bhalotia (Flipkart). YourDOST will strategically allocate the funds raised to rope in senior professionals from the industry in key leadership positions, to expand the scope of its operations and to reach out to more people.

Dealing with societal pressure, compulsion to perform and excel at work, family and marital issues, stress of studies, constant lifestyle comparison with the peer group due to over exposure to social media and several other factors have led to severe disturbances in our emotional stability. While the stress is on a constant rise, discussing it openly or dealing with it medically remains a taboo in our country.

This huge need gap and Richa Singh’s personal experience of a friend losing her life at IIT due to placement pressure led to birth of YourDOST to provide people with convenient yet anonymous access to experts consisting of life coaches, psychologists and other experienced individuals. Through this online platform which is available as a free service both through web portal and mobile app, users can choose to get into a live chat, find answers over email or book an appointment with the expert of their choice. It has over 300 experts on its platforms who conduct roughly 800 one-on-one sessions every day. Approximately 4,00,000 people pan-India have already sought guidance and emotional counselling on YourDOST since it went live in 2014.

Mridul Arora, Principal, SAIF Partners, said, “We are impressed by the refreshing approach YourDOST team has adopted to address an increasingly relevant issue of emotional & mental wellbeing. While still in early stages, we believe YourDOST is at the forefront of creating a new space in India which has extremely strong latent demand. With it’s strong focus on quality supply and maintaining user anonymity, YourDOST presents a unique proposition for consumers to overcome the prevailing hesitation associated with openly talking about mental issues. With this investment SAIF continues to identify and nurture businesses, right from seed stage/pre-Series A to beyond ."

Commenting on the partnership with SAIF Partners, Richa Singh, CEO, YourDOST said, “We have spent the last 1.5 years strengthening our product, creating awareness and understanding the needs of users. The entire team is now excited to enter into the next level of our evolution with support from a valuable partner like SAIF which has believed in our work and has invested in us. With the experience of SAIF Partners backing us and the funds we have raised, we are ready to accelerate our growth, expand the team and operations and reach out to more and more people with their emotional wellness coach - YourDOST.”

Incepted in December 2014, YourDOST raised close to $400,000 in seed funding round from a group of well known angel investors. YourDOST was founded in December 2014 by IIT-Guwahati alumnus Richa Singh, along with IIM-Bangalore’s Puneet Manuja, Northeastern University alumnus Satyajeet Nandekar and Prakhar Verma, a computer science graduate from BMSCE, Bengaluru.

YourDOST – addressing the need gap:

Access and awareness towards mental and emotional wellbeing is very restricted in India and comes with several taboos associated with it. Here are some facts highlighting this challenge:

• According to government estimates, 1 in 5 people in India need counselling, either psychological or psychiatric


• For an estimated 70 million+ people living with psychosocial problems and disabilities, there are less than 50 government mental health establishments.


• According to a report by WHO in 2011, 1 out of 7 people in India i.e. 15% of Indian population was suffering from depression in 2015, this has seen an alarming rise with 20% of Indian population being depressed today.


• 50% of corporate India is suffering from chronic stress. In fact as per a survey by ASSOCHAM earlier this year, highlights that the rate of emotional problems such as anxiety and depression has increased by 45-50% among corporate employees in the last eight years.


• According to medical experts, 4 in 5 people suffering from severe mental ailment in India choose not to treat it which causes early death by at least 15-20 years as compared to mentally healthy people

YourDOST is one of its kind online emotional wellness platform to get support from experts consisting of life coaches, psychologists and other experienced individuals. It is available to people via its web platform and also on mobile through its recently launched mobile app on android platform and IOS platform. The startup allows instant access to users to a team of 300+ experts and share their problems through an online interface, be it a live chat or email query or even book one on one interaction with the expert of their choice. The key aspect of this venture is that people are kept completely anonymous throughout the platform.

YourDOST aims to reduce the stigma attached to seeking help for mental wellness in our country and with the use of technology wants to make expert help widely and instantly available to people looking for emotional and mental wellbeing.

FarEye Raises $3.5M in Series A Funding Round from Saif Partners

FarEye, India’s leading Logistics Management Software, today announced it has just completed its Series A round of funding and has raised $3.5 million (20 crores INR) as growth funds from Saif Partners known for supporting visionary entrepreneurs across the globe.

The funds raised are purely growth funds and this amount will be used for business expansion to other territories. FarEye wants to capitalize on their logistics management expertise and help enterprises across the globe streamline their logistics. FarEye is  a productivity tool for enterprises as well as the workforce - FarEye has a strong road-map of product enhancement for next 12 months and adding new features regularly. They plan to integrate with IoT platforms & drones to enable automated delivery.

Commenting on the company’s vision, Mr. Kushal Nahata, Co-founder said “We are profitable B2B startup and believe in organic growth. Our vision is to create a global technology company which stays for decades. We might take time to understand but would like to build things to last long. We are in the path of  revolutionizing the entire delivery mechanism by creating the largest virtual network of delivery workforce across regions. Plagued by operational inefficiencies and high costs, the $60,000 billion logistics industry provides a huge opportunity to FarEye. We are here to streamline logistics in all the industry verticals.”

Established in 2013 by Kushal Nahata, Gaurav Srivastava and Gautam Kumar, FarEye was launched with an aim to solve the complicated last mile delivery issues on a mobile platform. The aim of FarEye was to solve the critical problems faced by any business - real time coordination between employees on the go, job execution and customer requests; by moving operations on a mobile. Through FarEye’s automation software companies can schedule & dispatch jobs, monitor execution and analyze performance; all in real time – making enterprises more effective and streamlined. With this FarEye helps companies in selling the experience and not just the product.

With successful use cases for Warehousing, First Mile Pick-Up, Milk Runs, On-demand/Hyperlocal solution, Last Mile Delivery and Reverse pick-ups (90-min & non-time bound) FarEye has become the trusted end-to-end mobility solution for logistics & supply chain leaders. On an average FarEye has been able to increase first time successful job attempts by 22% and save 2.3 man –hours per employee per day.

Mr. Gautam Kumar, Co-Founder, FarEye further adds "We don’t believe ‘one solution fits all’ mantra – we believe that each client has unique requirements and should be provided with a tailor – made solution to address critical operational challenges. In today’s digital age where brand loyalty is redundant, we ensure that our customers deliver on-time commitment and provide exemplary services to their end customer.”

According to the Mr. Gaurav Srivastava, CTO & Co-Founder “It is a known fact that logistics is both- the key to success and cause for failure. We understood that logistics segment required streamlining and restructuring to cater to the ever-growing e-commerce segment in India. Having foresight at that time, we decided to focus on logistics management with technology rather than logistics infrastructure. Business growth in the logistics sector would directly relate to improved service delivery and customer satisfaction across businesses.”

FarEye is headquartered in New Delhi and is trusted by over 75 clients ranging from the exclusive e-commerce solution providers like Ecom express, Gojavas, Holisol etc to the traditional behemoths like DTDC, Blue Dart, Safe Express, Bajaj Capital, Hitachi etc.  Globally FarEye has been able to leave its mark by optimizing and automating logistics operations for companies like Zalora, ACommerce, Sephora, MarkaVIP etc in South East Asia and Middle East. Currently, it has a team of 30 and they plan to expand the team for sales, delivery & product and would reach a number of 60 in next few months.

Image Source: ShutterStock

ClearTax Raises $12M in Series A Round from SAIF Partners

Once more underlining why it is considered to be one of the most exciting FinTech ventures in the country, ClearTax, India’s leading Income Tax Returns e-filing website, has announced the successful conclusion of its $12 million Series-A investment round. The funding round, was led by Ravi Adusumalli of SAIF Partners, will be chiefly utilised by ClearTax to build and launch new products, hire 100+ engineers and build its executive leadership team.

ClearTax will be leveraging the capital raised to triple its overall team size to 300 employees by the end of the year. Top talent from India and the Silicon Valley is expected to be hired in the coming months as the company looks to scale up its executive leadership as well as strengthen its employee base.

Commenting on the capital raised, Mr Archit Gupta, Founder & CEO ClearTax said, “Our Series-A investment is a strong validation of the ClearTax vision and demonstrates the clear market leadership ClearTax has. Instead of spending the capital raised on advertising, we’ll be investing in building world class technology products, and in top notch engineering talent from within India & Silicon Valley. As a founder, I’m deeply excited the impact fintech will have on India and I’m proud of our team for reaching this milestone.”

Having already established itself as the most dominant player in the tax returns e-filing space, ClearTax will also be looking to tap into greater opportunities in the space of Consumer and Business taxes, Tax savings and Investments. Newer products are expected to be rolled out in the near future as ClearTax looks to consolidate its presence across the country by extending its services to 25 lakh users by the year end. Over 10 Lakh users e-filed their tax returns through ClearTax during the 2015-16 fiscal.

Ravi Adusumalli of SAIF Partners said, “The ClearTax team has demonstrated distinctive growth over last five years to build the largest tax filing platform in India. We are very excited to partner with Archit and team as they translate their market leadership in tax filing space to become one of the largest fin-tech platforms in India. We look forward to working with the Cleartax team in their journey to create a wide range of offerings for retail and SME customers.”

The latest development follows close on heels of recent angel investment into ClearTax by leading Silicon Valley angels such as Max Levchin, Neeraj Arora, Scott Bannister and Cyan Bannister as well as a $2 million pre-Series A round that saw participation from Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund. The Bangalore-based venture has already earmarked machine learning and deep tech as its top priorities in product and technology. ClearTax is also building out its executive leadership team in the areas of Business and Engineering. Recently executives from Flipkart & InMobi have joined ClearTax in the core team.

About ClearTax

Started in 2011, ClearTax aims to simplify financial lives of Indian taxpayers, both Individuals and Businesses.

ClearTax is India’s leading tax filing platform. ClearTax is used by over 1 Million Indian Taxpayers to e-File their Tax Returns making it India’s largest player in the space. Taxpayers just have to upload their Form-16 PDF, and their Tax Return is prepared automatically by ClearTax software within seconds.

Besides Individuals, over 10,000 CA firms and thousands of businesses across India use the ClearTax platform for Tax & TDS returns.

ClearTax was founded by Archit Gupta along with his father Raja Ram Gupta, a Chartered Accountant; Srivatsan Chari; and Ankit Solanki. Archit, co-founder & CEO is an IIT Guwahati alum with a BTech in Computer Science. He holds a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

ClearTax was Y-Combinator’s first India focused investment. It also counts Max Levchin, Scott Bannister, Neeraj Arora, Ruchi Sanghvi and Naval Ravikant as investors.