Saas Startup Synup Raises $6M in Series A; Aims to Achieve 10x Growth in the Next 3 Years

Synup, a provider of SaaS-based solutions that enables local businesses to manage their online presence, today announced it has completed a $6 million (approx INR 40 crores) Series A round of financing. The fresh round of investment is led by Vertex Ventures along with Synup’s existing investor, Prime Venture Partners, who also participated in the round. The investment will help the company to rapidly expand its sales and marketing efforts as well as broaden and accelerate product development.

Ben Mathias, Managing Partner, Vertex Ventures said, “Synup has been able to solve a difficult problem in a market that is largely underpenetrated. Their strong early customer traction is a testament to the efficacy of their approach to address this massive market opportunity. We have been impressed with the experience of their team and the thoughtful design of their product, and look forward to helping scale this company.”

Shripati Acharya, Managing Partner, Prime Venture Partners said, “Prime is thrilled to continue our partnership with Synup. Synup is amongst the first wave of global SaaS companies to come out of India and we are looking forward to being a part of this journey along with Vertex. When we initially invested, Synup was just starting their journey. However, the clarity of vision from Ashwin in understanding both the opportunity and the execution of it left little doubt in our minds that we wanted to back Synup. In two years Synup has achieved rapid customer traction and revenue growth and is well positioned to scale to the next level.”

The Series A financing builds on an exceptional year for Synup which saw a rapidly growing roster of clients, and market momentum. Just after its launch in 2015, Synup achieved $1 million in ARR in the first 9 months, and since then over 50,000 locations in the U.S & Canada have used its solutions. The company has already started to generate a positive cash flow and aims to grow 10x in the next 3 years.

Currently, local businesses are getting discovered in hundreds of fragmented consumer platforms on the web & mobile. Most of these listings have to be manually updated across all the platforms and it takes approximately 8 hours a week for a store manager to just update location data. The listings also do not provide the business with any analytics or insight into user reviews.

Synup offers a complete local marketing solution that makes it easy for businesses to manage their location data, presence, reputation and analytics. Synup tracks hundreds of thousands of business profiles & monitors millions of interactions to provide businesses with automated marketing as well as insights that they would otherwise not get. It also manages and boosts local SEO efforts for agencies, enterprises and small businesses with multiple locations. Synup works with both digital agencies and businesses directly to manage their listings on over 50 of the most important local search destinations. Additionally, it tracks customer reviews and analyses rankings on different search engines.

In the next six months, the company wants to go beyond location data management and offer a wider breadth of products to its customers. The company is bullish on its growth as out of the total 28 million local businesses in the US, only about a million (3.57%), use automated location-marketing services like Synup.

Synup’s founder Ashwin Ramesh is a serial entrepreneur having started his first business when he was still in high school. Currently, the company has over 40 employees and is looking to hire across all sections of the business. Synup plans to expand into Europe and United Kingdom by mid - 2018.

Ashwin Ramesh, Founder & CEO, Synup said, “These are exciting times at Synup. There is an undisputed need for an automated marketing solution for millions of local businesses across the globe. We are fortunate to have partnered with two top tier investors such as Vertex and Prime, who bring both a deep understanding of our business as well as operational expertise. We have built a unique and cost effective solution and have seen some excellent growth so far and aim to take this to other geographies soon with a wider product offering.”

With cumulative committed capital in excess of $2.5 billion, Vertex invests in early-stage IT and healthcare opportunities in China, Silicon Valley, India, Israel, and South East Asia. Since 1988, Vertex is honoured to have partnered with the founders of global leaders such as Waze, 91, Grab, IGG, CyberArk, Reebonz, SolarEdge, Force10, FirstCry, Yatra and Changba. Vertex Ventures SEA is one of the pillars of the Vertex Group's network of Funds focusing on early stage opportunities in the Information Technology sector in SEA and India.

Prime Venture Partners is a Bangalore-based seed fund led by serial entrepreneurs Shripati Acharya, Sanjay Swamy, and Amit Somani. The fund is focused on building disruptive product companies out of India, and addresses a much needed gap in the Indian startup ecosystem - by bringing a combination of first-hand entrepreneurial experience, operating expertise and meaningful capital. Prime Venture Partners’ portfolio includes exciting startups such as KredX, Maya, AffordPlan, MoneyTap, NiYO, Ezetap, SmartOwner, Synup, HackerEarth, happay, Nimble Wireless, Vidgyor and ZipDial (acquired by Twitter).

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Minio Raises $20M in Series A Funding Led by Nexus Venture, Dell Technologies Capital & General Catalyst Partners

Minio, a provider of open source object storage for cloud-native and containerized applications, today announced $20M in Series A funding jointly led by Dell Technologies Capital, General Catalyst Partners and Nexus Venture Partners, with participation by Intel Capital, AME Cloud and Steve Singh. Funding will be allocated to accelerating product development, company growth and keeping pace with rapidly growing industry demand. The company also announced today its multi-cloud object storage offering, bringing Amazon S3 compatible object APIs to all cloud-native environments.

“As enterprises consider new hybrid IT solutions like VMware on AWS to extend their on-premise virtual environments, Minio bridges the final data storage gap between on-premise and cloud hosting that otherwise severely limits the cloud opportunity,” said Mike Matchett, senior analyst and consultant at Taneja Group. “Whether Minio is running over VMware vSAN, HPE Nimble or a developer’s Mac laptop, it provides a consistent AWS S3 compatible object storage service.”

Minio enables developers to store unstructured data on any public or private cloud infrastructure. Now with support for multi-cloud, Minio is enabling users to build their own Amazon S3-compatible object storage on bare metal, public cloud or existing SAN/NAS storage infrastructure. With over 10M downloads since its general availability in January 2017, Minio’s cloud-native object storage server has been widely recognized within the cloud community.

“Emerging trends like AI, IoT and 5G will further accelerate the massive explosion of data taking place today,” said Anand Babu Periasamy, co-founder and CEO of Minio. “With such an influx, multi-cloud and standardization of the infrastructure stack is inevitable. We’re thrilled to be pushing the industry forward with support for multi-cloud, and welcome our newest investors as we continue to innovate and meet growing market demand.”

Minio’s object storage server is production ready, with major features including erasure code, bitrot protection, lambda compute and encryption. The recent developments brought tighter integration with popular public and private cloud environments based on Docker, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, DC/OS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Minio also provides metadata search, allowing users to achieve this functionality through Minio lambda functions, in conjunction with a database or a message queue. Minio will expand Search research and development significantly moving forward.

“Minio was quick to recognize the explosive growth of unstructured data and is delivering innovative solutions to address customer’s cloud-native object storage needs. The addition of multi-cloud support underscores Minio’s deep understanding of industry trends and facilitates customer-choice” said Gregg Adkin, Managing Director of Dell Technologies Capital. “We look forward to working with Minio not only from an investor perspective but also to help them utilize Dell Technologies’ extensive ecosystem to deliver cloud storage solutions to customers around the globe.”

Earlier this month, storage management firm, PrimaryIO has secured seed funding of $5.6 million from Accel, Exfinity Ventures and Partech Ventures, to expedite its product development efforts. In July, Bengaluru-based cloud computing platform Minjar raised pre-series A funding led by Blume Ventures.

Minio Raises $20M in Series A Funding Led by Nexus Venture, Dell Technologies Capital & General Catalyst Partners

Minio, a provider of open source object storage for cloud-native and containerized applications, today announced $20M in Series A funding jointly led by Dell Technologies Capital, General Catalyst Partners and Nexus Venture Partners, with participation by Intel Capital, AME Cloud and Steve Singh. Funding will be allocated to accelerating product development, company growth and keeping pace with rapidly growing industry demand. The company also announced today its multi-cloud object storage offering, bringing Amazon S3 compatible object APIs to all cloud-native environments.

“As enterprises consider new hybrid IT solutions like VMware on AWS to extend their on-premise virtual environments, Minio bridges the final data storage gap between on-premise and cloud hosting that otherwise severely limits the cloud opportunity,” said Mike Matchett, senior analyst and consultant at Taneja Group. “Whether Minio is running over VMware vSAN, HPE Nimble or a developer’s Mac laptop, it provides a consistent AWS S3 compatible object storage service.”

Minio enables developers to store unstructured data on any public or private cloud infrastructure. Now with support for multi-cloud, Minio is enabling users to build their own Amazon S3-compatible object storage on bare metal, public cloud or existing SAN/NAS storage infrastructure. With over 10M downloads since its general availability in January 2017, Minio’s cloud-native object storage server has been widely recognized within the cloud community.

“Emerging trends like AI, IoT and 5G will further accelerate the massive explosion of data taking place today,” said Anand Babu Periasamy, co-founder and CEO of Minio. “With such an influx, multi-cloud and standardization of the infrastructure stack is inevitable. We’re thrilled to be pushing the industry forward with support for multi-cloud, and welcome our newest investors as we continue to innovate and meet growing market demand.”

Minio’s object storage server is production ready, with major features including erasure code, bitrot protection, lambda compute and encryption. The recent developments brought tighter integration with popular public and private cloud environments based on Docker, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, DC/OS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Minio also provides metadata search, allowing users to achieve this functionality through Minio lambda functions, in conjunction with a database or a message queue. Minio will expand Search research and development significantly moving forward.

“Minio was quick to recognize the explosive growth of unstructured data and is delivering innovative solutions to address customer’s cloud-native object storage needs. The addition of multi-cloud support underscores Minio’s deep understanding of industry trends and facilitates customer-choice” said Gregg Adkin, Managing Director of Dell Technologies Capital. “We look forward to working with Minio not only from an investor perspective but also to help them utilize Dell Technologies’ extensive ecosystem to deliver cloud storage solutions to customers around the globe.”

Earlier this month, storage management firm, PrimaryIO has secured seed funding of $5.6 million from Accel, Exfinity Ventures and Partech Ventures, to expedite its product development efforts. In July, Bengaluru-based cloud computing platform Minjar raised pre-series A funding led by Blume Ventures.

Jumbotail Raises $8.5M in Series A from Kalaari Capital and Nexus Venture Partners

Jumbotail, a leading online marketplace for food and grocery has raised $8.5mn in Series A from Kalaari Capital and Nexus Venture Partners. Nexus Venture Partners had earlier invested $2mn in the company. Jumbotail serves thousands of wholesale customers such as kirana stores and Horeca businesses in Bangalore. The company plans to utilise the funds for building cutting edge technologies and enhance operational capabilities to deliver the best customer experience in the wholesale food and grocery sector.

Founded in Nov 2015 by Stanford alumni S. Karthik Venkateswaran and Ashish Jhina, Jumbotail's vision is to organise the food and grocery ecosystem in India using technology, data science and design. Jumbotail offers a wide selection of products including staples, spices, dry fruits, packaged foods, and FMCG products. Sellers (traders, manufacturers and brands) can list their food, grocery and FMCG products on the Jumbotail Marketplace, which is accessible to customers through a mobile app available in 4 languages - Kannada, Malayalam, Hindi and English. Jumbotail provides full stack services including storefront delivery and payments collection for its sellers, as well as working capital credit from third party credit providers to its customers using rich transactional data and proprietary algorithms.

Ashish Jhina, Co-founder & COO, Jumbotail, says, “Manufacturers and brands can instantly get direct and highly targeted access to thousands of retailers and institutional customers through the Jumbotail platform without needing to invest in expensive physical distribution networks. Jumbotail also opens up the Kirana network to financial institutions looking to extend credit in a cost-effective and scalable manner.”

Bala Srinivasa, Partner, Kalaari Capital, adds, “98% of India’s food and grocery consumption is via Kirana stores. Jumbotail brings tech centric innovation to address massive inefficiencies in terms of product discovery, distribution costs, stock outs, and pricing. We are excited by their ability to eliminate information asymmetry, aggregate previously unavailable demand and supply data, and significantly improve economic outcomes for manufacturers, brands, financial institutions and kirana owners."

“While this is a multi-billion-dollar market opportunity, it requires us to solve challenging problems that are so unique to India that copycat models will not work. We are putting our customers first and building technologies and supply chains that will work for the next billion Indians in distributed, chaotic and unstructured environments”, says Karthik Venkateswaran, Co-founder & CEO, Jumbotail.

Sameer Brij Verma, Director, Nexus Venture Partners, adds, “Nexus is glad to have partnered with the Jumbotail team since its very inception. Jumbotail is going after a very large but in-efficient market that requires very strong first-principles approach towards solving challenges across commerce, efficient fulfilment, payments and credit via their platform. We feel this team and their technology platform has a shot at solving these challenges to create enduring value for the kirana / horeca segment over the next few years.”

Jumbotail has built a mission driven team with strong character and perseverance, and plans to hire top talent who are passionate about fundamentally transforming the food and grocery ecosystem in India.

In-Video Discovery Platform Tagos Design Raises $5M in Series A Funding

Tagos Design Innovations Pvt. Ltd, an in-video discovery platform, has raised $5 million in a Series-A funding round from a venture capital firm and two global corporations. The company did not disclose the names of the investors.

Founded in 2014 by GBS Bindra, Sushant Panda, and Tripat Preet Singh, Tagos operates an in-video platform called Charmboard that makes videos interactive. For instance, a user can touch any object on a streaming video, be it a person, dress, a piece of furniture or an accessory, without interrupting the visual. That particular object is bookmarked and saved automatically and can be accessed by the consumer after watching the video to cull out more details about the object.

“Marketers increasingly want to put the customer at the centre of their thinking and allow them to define each moment that matters. With our product offering marketers can create smarter journeys that deliver the right content exactly when the customer needs it,” G.B.S Bindra, founder and chief executive at Tagos, said in a statement.

The fresh funding will be deployed to enhance the product, increase user base and hire more people.

In July last year, Tagos had raised an undisclosed amount from a clutch of investors including Andy Green, former chief executive at Logica, David King, former chief executive at the Time Out Group, Gautham Radhakrishnan, partner at Tata Opportunities Fund and Vikram Kaushik, former managing director and chief executive at Tata Sky.

Another startup working in this space is VideoTap, which raised $1 million angel funding in September 2016.

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Unified Data Analysis Platform FORMCEPT Secures Series A Funding From GVFL

An incubatee of the Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship CIIE-IIM Ahmadabad, FORMCEPT Technologies and Solutions has secured an undisclosed amount of Series A funding led by a pioneer venture capital fund in India, GVFL Ltd.

GVFL has invested in FORMCEPT through its recent technology and innovation fund, GVFL Startup Fund. With this round, Sankalp Bajpai, Vice President, Investments, GVFL will be joining the board of FORMCEPT.

Founded in 1990 at the initiative of World Bank, GVFL Ltd has supported ventures working on cutting-edge technology as well as encouraged entrepreneurs with innovative ideas. Over the past two decades, GVFL has raised eight venture capital funds which have supported over 80 companies.

With the freshly infused fund, startup plans to accelerate its growth by going global. Commenting on the development, Suresh Srinivasan, Co-founder, FORMCEPT said “Our product is already proven with a handful of Fortune 1000 clients. We would now expand our technology team in India and cater to international markets where our solutions have immense potential.”

Co-founded by Suresh Srinivasan and Anuj Kumar in 2011, FORMCEPT is a unified data analysis platform that helps enterprises get actionable insights from their data faster.
It not only provides a unified interface for storing and querying datasets but also provides batch processing, stream processing and interactive analysis out of the box. It is built on top of NoSQL technologies, like- HDFS, HBase for storage, systems like Map-Reduce, Spark, Shark and Storm for data processing and utilizes the power of graph database, key-value store and index store to provide a seamless experience for the end users.

Known for nurturing its investee startups with mentoring and support, the portfolio team of CIIE played an active role in mobilising this round for Bengaluru-based FORMCEPT. CIIE had a major head-start in cognitive data analytics when it incubated FORMCEPT.

CIIE is the technology business incubator based at the IIMA, aiming to help India’s budding entrepreneurs set up innovative, disruptive and scalable ventures through mentoring, incubation, advising and funding initiatives.

Health Startup Grow Fit Closes Series A Funding of $4.5M from MEMG and Other Investors

Growth Story-backed mobile health company Grow Fit announced USD $4.5 million in Series A funding led by MEMG (Manipal Education and Medical Group), the PE arm of the Manipal Group. With this, Dr. Ranjan Pai, the MD & CEO of MEMG, will be joining the Board of Directors. The SAR Group and The Grover Trust, Grow Fit’s seed investors, also participated in this round.

Started in September 2015, Grow Fit is a full-stack health tech company committed to helping Indians achieve peak wellness through a combination of data science, medical expertise and personalised inputs. To help the over 300 million Indians who are at risk of contracting lifestyle disease, Grow Fit offers a comprehensive approach combining expert coaching, health foods and behavioral insights through their scalable technology platform. With a 80%+ success rate, the company is poised to take its unique approach further with this funding. The Grow Fit mobile app has been downloaded over 300,000 times (Android and iOS) and more than 150,000 diet charts have been generated for users. The company uses data science and machine learning to identify and validate strategies for customer success. Grow Fit recently also expanded into the Functional Beverages segment with the acquisition of Drink King, a nutritional beverage platform started in early 2015.

Jyotsna Pattabiraman, Founder and CEO at Grow Fit said, “Grow Fit combines data science, medical science and behavioural insights to help people achieve their health goals and live their best lives. We are an outcome-oriented company and have always stressed a science-and-data approach. I am delighted that leading professionals from the Manipal Hospital have validated our approach. Grow Fit now has the backing of one of the top medical groups in the country and we are excited about the next phase of growth with this investment."

The funding led by MEMG is also unique as the development marks a rare instance where an Indian health tech company has been validated by doctors as well as investors.

K Ganesh, Partner, Growth Story, the entrepreneurship platform that promotes high-potential ventures including Grow Fit said: “Companies which have the right genes can always raise funding, even in a somewhat tight market. Grow Fit’s laser-like focus on customer outcomes sets it apart from others. It takes a unique dedication to go against the conventional wisdom of transactions and the team at Grow Fit has demonstrated this commitment time and again."

Dr. Ranjan Pai, CEO and MD, MEMG said, “Grow Fit has the right approach to reach the millions of Indians who can benefit from better nutrition and coaching. I was impressed by their novel approach, their investment in R&D and their technology platform. Indians need to make drastic changes to their health habits and Grow Fit makes it effortless for them. This is a huge opportunity and we are looking forward to unlocking it."

Grow Fit has a comprehensive approach that addresses all aspects of wellness including nutrition, activity, skin/hair, sleep and mental wellness. Through their expert platform, users across India are connected with experts chosen based on their clinical/scientific background and experience with lifestyle diseases. In fact, Grow Fit has gone beyond advice to cover the last mile, formulating foods that have been shown to improve health metrics significantly in a matter of weeks.

Kris Gopalakrishnan, Co-Founder, Infosys and an early investor in Grow Fit, commented, “Grow Fit has the ability to address both national and international markets. As prosperity increases globally, our nutritional habits have to compensate for our sedentary lifestyle and dependence on fast foods. Grow Fit has a relevant model that could address this gap and be effective anywhere in the world.”

This investment comes at a time when countries the world over are grappling with healthcare costs. According to the World Economic Forum, in India alone, over six million lives are lost every year due to lifestyle diseases and the economic burden of lifestyle diseases has been estimated to be over $4.58 trillion by 2030.

Grow Fit's future plans include expanding solutions to fertility, joint health, stress management and more, all through the mobile. The venture also plans to integrate different sources of data from wearable technology and medical reports in order to make the app a one-stop, comprehensive companion for wellness.

Fashion eCommerce Portal Fynd Raises $2.4M Led by IIFL Seed Ventures; Closes Series A at $3.4M

Fynd, the unique fashion e-commerce portal that sources its inventory directly from the brand store, has closed its Series A round of funding at $3.4 million. Fynd raised $2.4 million from the lead investor, IIFL Seed Ventures followed by an active participation from Kae Capital, FJ Labs, Singularity Ventures, GrowX,Traxcn Labs and Hong Kong based Axis Capital in the round. The offline to online fashion commerce platform will leverage the capital infusion for accelerated growth, to enhance its consumer base, strengthen its tech backbone and to optimize its operations including marketing strategies.

Fynd had earlier raised $500K from Venture Catalysts in March and $500K from Silicon Valley-based Rocketship in May in its series A round. Fynd makes optimal use of both online and offline forms of retail and channelizes its combined outreach for a superior customer experience. With 8,000+ outlets on board, Fynd’s unique proprietary inventory integrations enable customers to discover fashion in real-time and know the exact specifications of the products available

Commenting on the funds received, Fynd Co-founder, Harsh Shah said, “Fynd is growing steadily and has managed to seal on some exciting partnerships in the past few months. Thanks to its unique business model it has also managed to win tremendous investor confidence. Our vision is to revolutionize the online and offline shopping experience across all channels and customer touch-points and reach out to more customers in the coming months. The capital raised in our Series A round of funding will help us further bolster our growth trajectory and enhance our tech capabilities.”

“Fynd is going through an exciting phase; it is leading the way for O2O (offline to online) commerce in India and it is the right time for Fynd to accelerate its growth strategy by reaching out to larger number of end consumers as well as enterprise clients.” – Purvi Parkeria, Sr. VP IIFL Seed Ventures

“The Fynd team has consistently demonstrated their ability to listen to the market and build scalable products. From their B2B days to their current model, Fynd has shown impressive growth and is looking to capture a big opportunity in the O2O (offline to online) Fashion segment. Building a successful commercial operation with a strong technology backbone is what differentiates this company and sets it up for the next level of growth.” – Vidushi Kamani, Venture Partner, Kae Capital

Fynd’s latest round of funding will enable the platform to further enhance the way it engages with consumers in a better way. The O2O platform directly sources products across various categories including clothing, footwear, jewellery and accessories, from the most prominent brands in the country (via their in-store inventory) and brings them online. Defying the conventional style of shopping, this unique sourcing model enables Fynd to deliver to its online customer the latest products available in the brand stores at their home.

Besides this, Fynd’s in-store product ‘Fynd Store’ helps the brand stores save their in-store sales which otherwise are lost due to unavailability of the product. Fynd store helps the store managers place an order on behalf of their walk-in customers in case the desired product is currently not available in their store which is then delivered directly to the customer’s address, thus helping brands save the sales which otherwise would have been lost.

Goodera Secures $5.5 Mn Funding From Nexus Venture Partners And Omidyar Network

CSR and Sustainability Management technology platform, Goodera has raised its Series A round of funding of $5.5 million from Nexus Venture Partners and Omidyar Network. Varsha Rao, previously Head of Global Operations at Airbnb also participated in this round along with other prominent angels. Apart from funding, Naren Gupta, co-founder and MD, Nexus Venture Partners has joined the Goodera board.

Startup plans to utilise freshly infused funds in strengthening their technology, deepening domain expertise and supporting customer acquisition and experience.

Commenting on the development, Naren Gupta, Co-founder and MD, Nexus Venture Partners said, “As billions of dollars flow annually through the global ecosystem of social and community good, an innovative technology platform like Goodera enables corporates to measure and optimize their CSR and sustainability goals in a simple, transparent, and engaging manner. We are thrilled to work with the Goodera team to leverage the company traction in India and the US to a broader group".

Co-headquartered in Bangalore and Menlo Park, Goodera is a CSR Lifecycle Management platform embedded with domain expertise, providing corporates automation and intelligence across monitoring and evaluation, impact measurement, grant making, reporting and employee volunteering. Founded in 2014 by Abhishek Humbad and Richa Bajpai, the platform helps solve the critical need for corporates and non-­‐profits to have last mile visibility of progress and impact measurement of their CSR projects.

The duo was a part of Forbes 30 under 30 Asia and India. Humbad did his engineering from BITS-Pilani and MBA from IIM Bengaluru whereas Bajpai did her engineering from Rajasthan University and dropped out of Indian School of Business (ISB) in the 3rd Term to build Goodera. The team at Goodera comprises of the brightest brains from the best of universities across the world, that comes with an experience in both technology and development sector.

“Goodera is creating business and social value at the scale at the global stage using best in class technology and solving big problems for the CSR ecosystem,” said Abhishek Humbad, Founder and Co-­CEO, Goodera.

Startup further enables effective governance in deciding and managing CSR projects, provide insights through dashboards for different stakeholders and data-driven stories of change for powerful communication. Additionally, Goodera enables companies to involve employees in volunteering at scale in an engaging manner while taking away the friction of sourcing volunteering opportunities, coordination and management of activities.

"Goodera empowers every stakeholder in the ecosystem including corporates, foundations, employees, government and NGOs. With the vision to power the world of good, Goodera is our new brand identity (we were previously known as NextGen), which resonates with our objective to become a trusted and a reliable partner for every corporate in the world," said Richa Bajpai, Founder and Co-­CEO, Goodera.

The company claims that more than 150 large enterprises including 24 in Global Fortune 500 have adopted Goodera to effectively measure, manage and report their CSR projects across more than 30 countries. It further boost that 10% of corporate India’s total CSR spend is managed on Goodera. 200,000 employees globally volunteer using Goodera.

PaySense Raises $5.3M in Series A Led by Jungle Ventures

PaySense, India’s fastest growing digital credit platform, today announced their Series A funding of $5.3 million. The round was led by Jungle Ventures with participation from Naspers Group and Nexus Venture Partners. The company had raised an earlier round of investment of $2.3 million led by Nexus Venture Partners and prominent global angels.

PaySense is a technology and data science company building new age financial products for Indian consumers. PaySense’s first product is a simple, fast and flexible credit platform that provides customers a variety of credit options for their needs. PaySense EMI is a personalized line of credit similar to a personal loan that can be used to make any purchase, offline or online, instantaneously by putting it on an affordable EMI plan. It is set-up and operated very easily and seamlessly using the Android app or website. One can use the full credit amount available at one time for a big purchase or flexibly use it like a string of multiple EMIs for various smaller purchases, as needed by the consumer.

The credit approval of the consumer is instant, and free. There is only a one- time, minimal documentation which is digital, easy and fast leveraging the ‘India stack’. PaySense customers love the hassle free process as they never need to wait for any bank loan or credit card.

PaySense process and the credit product is simple, transparent and honest. It is just one time documentation, which is almost paperless for most customers with Aadhaar.

Prashanth Ranganathan, Co-Founder and CEO of PaySense said, “India is a young country and lots of people are just starting off building their professional lives. They might not have a credit score and they might not have enrolled for a credit card yet! Access to credit is fundamental to unlocking opportunities of growth and improving oneself. Today access to convenient and flexible credit is limited to a few fortunate folks. With the explosion of data on individuals, better access and most importantly with our ability to make sense of these large volumes of data real-time, we can level the playing field in credit. Giving credit to folks who already have history is easy, our mission is to democratise credit by making it just as easy for folks without history and without paperwork.”

Amit Anand, Founder and Managing Partner, Jungle Ventures said, “We have patiently been looking at this space in India and feel very excited to eventually partner with the PaySense team and other investors. There are going to be a few mega companies being formed in this space and the PaySense team has demonstrated great understanding and traction on various aspects required to become a category leader here."

Anup Gupta, Managing Director, Nexus Venture Partners, who led the company’s seed round investment in the summer of 2015, said, “A large segment of Indian consumers are credit-worthy but not being addressed by conventional players. We are excited to partner with PaySense in the company’s mission to leverage data science and technology to provide right credit products to these customers in a seamless, low-friction manner.“

Sayali Karanjkar, Co-Founder and COO, said, “With respect to credit, India is a severely under-served market. Our research indicates that there is a rising demand for short-term flexible credit across the middle class aspirational youth. People need ready access to short-term, flexible and quick credit solutions for a variety of needs that improve their life and satisfy their aspirations. We are building PaySense to become a trusted financial partner to our consumers, we don’t just want to serve them once, we want to become their go-to solution for all their financial needs.”

The availability of this solution is useful even for those customers who do not have a credit rating based on no prior history. PaySense believes that they should be respected as well for their education and employment and given a chance to take EMIs, get the products they want and start their credit history too.

With electronic documentation and e-KYC being the norm of the day, PaySense can extend credit to its customers within hours. Once the verification has happened for the first time, the platform offers an instant credit line to its customers with custom loan options, which they can avail of, anytime. The credit line will grow with good credit history and repayment behaviors.

FinTech Startup EarlySalary Raises $4M in Series A from IDG Ventures India & DHFL

EarlySalary, India’s FinTech startup to offer Salary Advances and Instant Cash Loans has announced its Series A funding of $4 Million from IDG Ventures India (IDGVI) and Dewan Housing Finance Corp Ltd (DHFL).

The company focuses on helping young working professionals get Instant Loans and Salary Advances in minutes and is fast becoming the first line of credit to young working Indians. More than 80% of its customer base is in their first career roles and most of them are new to credit and are first time borrowers. Over the past year, EarlySalary developed its Underwriting System which is a self-learning Algo Based Decisioning System. The System in real time reviews Social Media and Credit Bureau data of customers and helps approve the loan for them.

Targeted at young working professionals with a clear focus, - ‘1st line of Credit for young working Indians’, Akshay Mehrotra, Co-Founder & CEO commented ‘We are very excited to have IDG Ventures India and DHFL as Investors on Board and this combination and capital will provide the necessary growth impetus and management depth needed to accelerate growth and the innovation process at EarlySalary.

Ashish Goyal, Co-Founder & CFO further added, ‘As a team, we are focused on solving the problem of providing access to instant credit & cash for a short period of time and at a reasonable price all time anytime’.

Speaking on this occasion, Karthik Prabhakar, Director, IDG Ventures India Advisors said, ‘We believe FinTech firms are changing the way India will bank and EarlySalary’s capability of using Social Media based Underwriting decisioning will help many young working professionals get access to credit which is otherwise not possible. This over a period of time will create a wealth of information on credit-worthy customers, to offer more diverse products through partners’.

Commenting on the development, Harshil Mehta, CEO, DHFL said, “We see a potential opportunity in EarlySalary which is led by an enterprising and talented group of founding members. The financial technology space in India is at an exciting stage and is steadily making deep inroads into the BFSI industry supported by cutting edge technology. We look forward to a synergistic association that will enable us to leverage their technology solutions, and to working closely with the team as they scale up the business.”

The Series A capital will be primarily deployed in three particular areas, vizz:
1. Build leverage on capital deployed for building products and lending book
2. Expand team specifically in skill sets of machine learning.
3. Grow customer base and provide 200,000 loans in this FY

EarlySalary was co-founded by Akshay Mehrotra and Ashish Goyal 18 months back and had raised Seed Funding from Ashok Agarwal of Transcorp International. Till date, the app has received 3,50,000+ downloads across its Android & iOS mobile app platform. The company has distributed 15,000+ loans to customers borrowing between Rs.8,000 to Rs.1,00,000 at a low cost of Rs.9 per Rs.10,000 per day. The company also partners with many large Corporates as well as SMEs across the country to give Salary Advances to employees.

UiPath Raises $30M in Series A Funding Led by Accel to Automate the Intelligent Enterprise

UiPath, the leading Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software company, has announced a Series A investment totaling $30 million led by Accel and with participation from previous investors Earlybird Venture Capital, Credo Ventures and Seedcamp. The funding will be used to accelerate the company’s rapid global expansion and product development, building on its six times growth in 2016.

UiPath builds intelligent software robots that help businesses globally automate repetitive processes by leveraging cutting-edge computer vision technology. Large organizations across every industry spend a significant amount of time and resources performing such processes across HR, finance, accounting and operations (e.g. claims handling for insurance providers, employee onboarding, back office support etc). Digitizing these processes improves productivity, accuracy and compliance dramatically, allowing employees to focus on more creative and strategic work.

UiPath will use this investment to boost hiring in order to keep up with rocketing demand for its products in North America, Western Europe, India, Japan and South East Asia. The funding will also support continued investment in product development and Artificial Intelligence capabilities, especially around its core computer vision technology. Additionally, the company will focus on cognitive capabilities enabling organizations to handle the vast amounts of structured and unstructured data required to deliver truly intelligent automation.

UiPath has built strong momentum in a short period of time, growing to a team of 150 employees. It has over 150 partners including the major consultancies such as Deloitte and Capgemini, and 200 customers globally in industries ranging from banking, financial services and insurance through to manufacturing, utilities, healthcare and government. Many leading enterprises are among its customers, including blue chip companies such as Lufthansa, Generali, Telenor and Dong Energy. The company is well positioned to conquer the global RPA market, which is expected to reach $9B in size in the next seven years.

This investment comes on the back of increasing funding activity for artificial intelligence startups. 2016 saw a record of $5B venture capital funds flowing into AI companies worldwide, an increase of 60% compared to 2015.2

“This investment will allow us to introduce the benefits of intelligent RPA to even more businesses around the world and remain at the forefront of a rapidly-advancing industry,” comments Daniel Dines, CEO and founder of UiPath. “We are making work more inspiring and effective for the people that drive our businesses and economies forward, and the potential that remains untapped for organizations is what makes this such an exciting market to work in.”

“UiPath is the backbone for the intelligent enterprise,” Luciana Lixandru, partner at Accel, comments. “Daniel’s clear and ambitious vision for the company has helped drive impressive traction in a short period of time. Many enterprises around the world are recognizing how its RPA software can make their business smarter, and yet UiPath has only scratched the surface.”

“We invest in companies that impact the world around us, and UiPath falls firmly into that category,” comments Dan Lupu, partner at Earlybird Venture Capital. “The rapid global growth that the business has achieved is evidence of the transformative nature of its technology. As a result, UiPath’s RPA technology solutions are playing a vital role in putting businesses at the cutting edge of their industry, now and in the future.”

Tech-Enabled Rental Brokerage Company, FastFox.com Raises Rs 30 Cr in Series A Funding

India’s tech-enabled rental brokerage company, FastFox.com has raised Rs. 30 crore from Lightspeed India Partners, Blume Ventures, CyberAgent Ventures and others, in Series A financing. The company plans to invest the funds to improve its technology solution, perfect its service delivery model and expand the team across engineering, sales and operations. GrowX ventures and IMJ Investment Partners also participated in the round.

Based out of Gurgaon, Fastfox was started by Pallav Pandey and Mukul Bhati in Nov 2014, had earlier raised Rs. 6 Crore in 2015 in Seed round also led by LightSpeed India Partners. Before FastFox.com, Pallav Pandey, an IIT Kanpur Alumnus, also founded Sequoia funded Knowlarity Communications, a cloud based telephony solutions provider. Mukul Bhati, Co-founder & CTO, is from IIT Guwahati and had previously played lead tech roles in companies like PayU, Knowlarity, and UrbanTouch.

“Pallav and his team have shown us that there is a large market in rentals that suffers from India-specific problems such as information scarcity, information asymmetry, trust deficits and small local networks, all of which can be solved through the power of the Internet and a tech-enabled approach like Fastfox.com.” said Dev Khare, Partner at Lightspeed India Partners Advisors.

“In India, 27% of urban families (approx. 20 Million) live on rent and spend a whopping $32 billion on rent. Yet popular websites are full of fake listings and they leave the home seeker to be serviced by local brokers. In contrast, FastFox.com handholds the customer in the entire journey from online discovery of options to field visits to negotiation with landlord and subsequent paper-work,” said Pandey, Co-Founder and CEO. “FastFox.com is one-stop shop for anyone looking to rent a home”, he added.

FastFox.com, which also owns BroEx – Indian information exchange for real estate brokers; used by 100,000+ brokers across the country, leverages network of brokers to procure updated information on rental homes in near real time.

FastFox.com is an O2O rental brokerage company based out of Gurgaon. It has more than 2,500 home listings available for renting immediately. All these properties have verified photographs of the house, and the locality around. They also give other details like whether the property is available for Bachelors or not or if the landlord is ok with pets. FastFox.com also professionally assists the customer through the search experience in arranging home visits and helping through owner negotiations. Overall the idea is to make the home search experience for the customer transparent & predictable from online search to home visits to move-in paperwork. It charges customers for successful closure.

Lending Platform CASHe Raises Rs 25 Cr in Series A Funding

Aeries Financial Technologies Pvt. Ltd., a fintech company promoted by serial entrepreneur and private equity investor Mr. V. Raman Kumar, today announced that CASHe, India’s growing app-only lending platform for young professionals has closed a series A funding from investor group led by Mr. Mathew Cyriac and advised by Florintree Advisors. The funding will further increase CASHe’s scale of business and solidify its position as the leading app-only lending platform. The company also announced that it has appointed Dr. Pulak Ghosh and Mr. Mathew Cyriac to its Board of Directors.

Mr. V. Raman Kumar, Chairman, Aeries Financial Technologies Pvt. Ltd., commented; “We are very excited to have finalizedthe Series A funding from investor group led by Mr. Mathew Cyriac and advised by Florintree Advisors. We thank our new investors for their confidence in CASHe. We have big plans for the business, and are proud to have a team on board that shares and believes in this vision. I also welcome Dr. Pulak Ghosh and Mr. Mathew Cyriac to the Board of Directors.

He further commented, “An influential scientist and thinker, Dr. Ghosh brings to CASHe his enormous domain knowledge, experience and expertise in big data analytics to CASHe. His inclusion further reinforces the preeminent position that CASHe has established for itself in the AI, Data Analytics and Machine Language backed new age financial technology space in India.”

“Mr. Cyriac joins CASHe as an investor / director. Drawing on his years of experience as an established private equity player, he will provide fresh insights to company’s business priorities as it continues to grow at an accelerated pace. The company looks forward to benefit from their extensive and diverse expertise to accelerate its strategic and organic growth initiatives,” he added.

CASHe provides immediate short-term personal loans to young professionals based on their social profile, merit and earning potential using its proprietary algorithm based machine learning platform. In April 2016, Aeries Financial Technologies Pvt. Ltd, launched its innovative technology-driven lending platform for the young, urban professionals. CASHe provides almost instantaneous loans on-demand. Its user-friendly digital interface enables faster loan application and quicker loan disbursals. CASHe’s provides hassle-free loans with its app enabled documentation and loan disbursal/repayment process. Powered by its industry-first algorithm driven credit scoring platform, The Social Loan Quotient (SLQ), CASHe quickly determines a user’s credit worthiness by using multiple unique data points to arrive at a distinct credit profile of the customer. CASHe is completely automated and requires no personal intervention and no physical documentation. The average time taken for a loan to be disbursed is about 8 minutes, subject to proper submission of all documents.

CASHe’s target audience is young working professionals in the age group of 23-35 years. CASHe offers loans ranging from Rs 5,000 to Rs 1,00,000 payable over 15,30 and 90 days.

Fashion eCommerce Portal Fynd Raises $500K in Series A Round from Venture Catalysts, Others

Identifying promising business ventures and providing them with the right opportunity has become the trademark of investors at Venture Catalysts, Indian seed investment and innovation platform. The platform has now participated in Series A funding round of Fynd, the fashion e-commerce portal with $500k.

Fynd is an online to offline e-commerce fashion marketplace. The platform is also the only fashion e-commerce portal in India which makes the in-store inventories available online before any other e-commerce networks. Its value proposition includes sourcing products from brand stores nearest to the customer, thus ensuring authenticity and timely delivery of the product. Gauging the immense potential of Fynd, Venture Catalysts was one of the key investors in the funding round which also saw participation from other prominent industry names.

Fynd seeks to leverage the venture capital firm’s extensive market expertise and industry-wide outreach and connections to further enhance its consumer offerings as well as brand strategy. Displaying their confidence on the potential of the platform, Anand Chandrasekaran, Facebook executive and former Chief Product Officer at Snapdeal, Rajiv Mehta, CEO of Arvind Sports, and Ramakant Sharma, Co-founder of Livspace and former VP of Myntra have also invested in Fynd in Pre series-A round, in January this year.

Dr. Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, Co-founder, Venture Catalysts said, “Fynd is a promising e-commerce venture which provides an innovative solution to every online shopper’s most basic problem – product delivery. The platform has performed splendidly in terms of product fulfillment and maintained seamless customer experience through unsurpassed quality and an array of brands. These factors have converted its buyers into loyal patrons.”

He added, “Venture Catalysts will provide Fynd with best-in-class mentorship to eliminate operational bottlenecks, accelerate its growth rate, and achieve sustained success. We are confident this promising business idea has the true potential to become a household brand in India.”

Commenting on the funds received, Fynd Co-founder, Harsh Shah said, “Early last year, we completed the preliminary testing of our business model and were scaling up our business from Mumbai to a pan-India presence. At that time we realized the need of expertise from industry majors who can actually guide us in building our product and also give us better industry exposure along with continuous feedback on our efforts.”

He added, “Our major purpose of raising the round wasn't to gain more capital but to also partner with mentors who can actually guide us with their experiences and insights.”

Having facilitated investments to the tune of Rs. 30 Crore in 15 start-ups nationally and overseas in the past one year, Venture Catalysts has established its position as the most active angel investment network in the country. The platform enables seed funding in the region of $100,000 to $1 million into promising early-stage and mid-stage ventures across a range of high-growth sectors such as e-commerce, fintech, artificial intelligence, and logistics etc, and currently, has more than 2000 investors associated with it.

Enterprise Datacenter and Cloud Service Provider Pi DATACENTERS Raises $23M in Series A Funding

Epsilon Venture Partners, the pan-Asian technology focused fund manager (Epsilon) along with a major Australian private equity group, has invested Rs. 154 crores ($23 million) in Pi DATACENTERS (Pi), India, an enterprise class datacenter and cloud service provider. Pi is headquartered at Amaravati, the capital of the newly re-organised state of Andhra Pradesh. Epsilon will be actively involved in assisting with the build and growth of Pi, having already introduced local blue-chip prospective clients.

Kalyan Muppaneni, Founder & CEO of Pi, said “We are excited to be associated with Epsilon and their co-investor in the current round. India is poised for an explosion in digital data with the numerous technology initiatives adopted by the government of India and the various state governments. Data is integral to a nation’s security and datacenters are the key building blocks for a nation’s infrastructure. Epsilon’s technology investment experience across the globe is of significant strategic value that would pave the way for global partnerships in ensuring that Pi brings state-of-the-art cloud infrastructure capability to India. The funds raised would add to help us roll out our first few datacenters across India. As more users go digital in India, lower latency is paramount for better user experience, which is possible only if the digital infrastructure is located within the country.”

The round was led by Epsilon’s General Partner based on the ground in India, Mahesh Vaidya, who will be joining the company’s board. Mahesh said “The Datacenter and Cloud Infrastructure space in India is poised for robust growth over the next decade as evidenced by the trends observed in mature economies such as the US and Europe. The majority of countries are already emphasizing data sovereignty as a vital element of a nation’s security with appropriate measures in place. India initiated moves in this area a few years ago, with the mandate for local hosting of all its citizens’ financial and personal data. Moreover, fundamentally, we believe that India will double its internet user base in the next 3-5 years and this should position Pi very well to capitalize on this secular growth opportunity.”

Sudheer Kuppam, Managing Partner of Epsilon and former head of Intel Capital Asia, added “We are delighted to add Pi DATACENTERS to our portfolio of Asian technology company investments. We feel very well placed to have a successful partnership with Pi, and have a fantastic like-minded investment partner in the Australian co-investor. This sizeable deployment of capital in such a quality company and team helps further demonstrate our sourcing and execution capability, and our ability in making decisions based on potential financial returns, as an independent fund manager.”

Lock Screen Platform SLIDE App Raises $3.6M in Series A Funding

SlideApp, a lock screen app that awards Android users for reading content, today announced its series A round of funding worth $3.6 million. The funding was led by Songhyun Investment, a leading South Korean VC firm. The app had previously raised $1.2 million as seed funding.

The app, which is just over a year old now, has witnessed a tremendous response so far has already amassed a download base of 5+ Million. The platform plans to utilize the newly raised funds to scale its user base, develop products and strengthen its brand presence in the market. It will also use part of the funding to further develop the platform in order to make it more and more innovative and user friendly.

The mobile media platform incentivizes its mobile users by awarding credit points every time they read content customized to their preference .The reward points accumulated can then be further utilized for mobile recharges.

The platform also doubles as new age advertising tool which allows it to cater successfully to the B2B segment. SlideApp has become the largest lockscreen mobile platform for an advertiser to get to new users at relatively low marketing costs.

Commenting on the company’s vision, Ms. Amrita Gujral, Co-Founder and India Business Head, said ”Our aim is to improve and enhance the experience of existing users and constantly focusing on acquiring new users. We will continue to multiply our outreach as much as we can and build upon providing value to our users. Also relentless support to advertisers in ways that result in maximum conversion for them is our endeavor.

Commenting on the innovation behind the app, Mr. Nakul Sethi, Co-founder and India Digital Head, said “We focus on providing quality content to our users as well as detailed and relevant analytics to our B2B customer base. The fresh round of investment will be used to enhance our targeting capabilities and unique advertising promotions."

Image : SlideApp's Nakul Sethi and Amrita Gujral

IndiaLends Raises $4 Million from American Express Ventures and Existing Investors

Fintech startup IndiaLends.com has raised $4 million in Series A funding from American Express Ventures, existing investors DSG Consumer Partners, Chinese investment firm Cyber Carrier VC and AdvantEdge Partners. The latest round of funding will be used by the company to expand its credit underwriting and analytics capabilities, offer more consumer-focussed products and increase its market footprint across India.

Started in March 2015 by ex-Capital One duo Gaurav Chopra and Mayank Kachhwaha, IndiaLends is a credit scoring and analytics platform focussed on disrupting the fragmented consumer lending market in the country. The company operates an online marketplace that allows consumers to shop for loan products, as well as access credit scores and financial education. It currently attracts over 140,000 visitors every month, and helps them to more quickly get access to cheaper credit. It also provides credit scoring solutions to financial institutions to help them increase their lending footprint.

“IndiaLends’ platform is helping to connect lenders and borrowers in India more efficiently by providing a user-friendly experience for consumers and leveraging a broader set of data than has traditionally been available to financial institutions in the market,” said Rohit Bodas, Partner at American Express Ventures. “We are pleased to support IndiaLends’ efforts to help consumers find credit solutions that meet their individual needs.”

“We have witnessed strong traction in the past year with our loan volumes growing 100% quarter-on-quarter,” said Chopra. “We have partnered with over 30 banks and Non-Banking Financial Companies (NBFCs) and now offer bespoke lending products in segments that have been historically underserved. The superior quality and quantity of data is helping financial institutions underwrite more and more of our customers. This new round of funding not only gives us the capital to scale exponentially but also provides us access to resources and learnings from developed fin-tech markets such as the U.S. and China.”

“Over the course of last year, we’ve made significant improvements in our data, analytics and technology capabilities. We’re now looking to build on this and have recently introduced products like credit builder loans for first-time borrowers, in partnership with select Banks and NBFCs,” said Kachhwaha, who is a part of the Forbes India ‘30 Under 30’ list. “We’re poised to provide affordable financial products to customers who would otherwise borrow from money lenders or payday companies at prohibitively high rates.”

IndiaLends’ strong product portfolio and experienced team of over 100 data scientists, technologists, marketers, and customer reps, has attracted interest from global institutional investors, including China’s Cyber Carrier VC. “We are committed to working with entrepreneurs that are solving some of the toughest problems in Consumer Finance, such as inadequate access to financial products, low financial literacy and poor lending processes. We are thrilled to partner with IndiaLends, which has extensive experience in consumer finance, tech, and data science and can lead the Fin-Tech revolution, aimed at overcoming these challenges worldwide,” said Jessica Wong, Managing Director, Cyber Carrier VC.

IndiaLends will continue to strengthen its proposition for customers and financial institutions by investing in its superior data analytics capabilities, which allow it to better assess customer segments that currently do not meet traditional scoring parameters.

IndiaLends was previously funded by DSG Consumer Partners and individual investors Siddharth Parekh and Gautham Radhakrishnan. “We continue to support IndiaLends in its endeavour to provide financial institutions with technology and risk-assessment capabilities that will help them lend to consumers at scale. The company’s track record and strong financial and business fundamentals, along with its team’s ability to create products that have high product-market fit has increased our faith in their vision and execution capabilities.” said Deepak Shahdadpuri, Managing Director, DSG Consumer Partners.

First Batch of K-Start Companies, Active Intelligence and AffordPlan, Raise Series-A Funding

Kstart, a seed initiative by Kalaari Capital, announced that two of their portfolio companies – Active Intelligence and AffordPlan – have raised Series-A funding from IDG and Prime Ventures respectively. Kalaari Capital also participated in both funding rounds.

AffordPlan is an alternative finance platform that enables healthcare affordability through planned savings. Hospitals and patients can co-design flexi payment plans so that patients can obtain medical treatment and products through a manageable payment structure developed based on individual need and cash flow. Founded by Tejbir Singh (CEO) and Hemal Bhatt (COO), AffordPlan looks to address a large problem that affects a sizable chunk of the Indian population.

Active Intelligence is an AI service platform for financial services. The platform is designed to automate customer interactions, using insights powered by algorithms. Co-founded by Ravi Shankar, Shankar Narayanan and Parikshit Paspulati, the Active AI team’s expertise enables the platform to be deeply connected to a financials platform via APIs or messaging interfaces, thereby automating customer service at a lower cost.

Speaking about the companies, Kalaari Capital MD Vani Kola says “AffordPlan started with a massive problem that they identified, one that is underserved and unmet today. They then brought together deep domain expertise to understand the nuances of the problem, and creating a solution for it. They did all of that in a structured but condensed time period.” Speaking about Active Intelligence, she continues, “They have a very impressive team. They come from many years of significant management experience in the banking industry, a deep network of relationships, and a lot of domain understanding”

These are the first companies to graduate from the Kstart seed initiative to the Kalaari portfolio.

“The biggest advantage we have from a Kalaari standpoint when we work with Kstart companies, is the previously unavailable ability to observe these companies at very close quarters – the way they challenge each other as a team, the way they solve problems, the way they define and refine their strategy”, says Bala Srinivasa, Partner at Kalaari Capital. “This makes it a lot easier when they come to us for Series-A funding. Having seen them through their journey so far, we have great conviction in being able to back them.”

Muthiah Venkateswaran, Partner at Kstart adds, “Both companies have displayed incredible resilience and focus on the end game. As a startup, it is easy to get swept up in the hundreds of things you can do, and lose sight of what you need to do. Both Active Intelligence and AffordPlan have stayed focused on what they needed to do to scale and succeed, and the Kstart team is excited to watch them grow.”

The company founders expressed excitement, adding that the Kstart program played an important role in supporting and preparing them for the leap to Series-A. Says Tejbir Singh of AffordPlan, “Kstart has been a wonderful experience, with a mix of great people and invaluable advice. We feel like we had the best of both worlds – the early-stage ecosystem and guidance of Kstart, and the mature environment and mentorship of Kalaari. It has been a rich experience.”
Ravi Shankar of Active Intelligence concurs, “We were one of the first companies to enter Kstart, and it has been a fascinating ride. We had the benefit of having Bala from Kalaari be on our board from the very beginning, and have had several in-depth interactions with other senior members of Kalaari, including Vani [Kola]. Both Kstart and Kalaari are constantly enabling us to be a successful company in a competitive market.”

Active Intelligence raised $3 million in a joint round with IDG Ventures and Kalaari Capital, while AffordPlan raised $3 million in a joint round with Prime Ventures and Kalaari Capital.

Image Source: ShutterStock

Indian Second Hand Goods Marketplace Zefo Raises Rs 40 Cr in Series A Funding

Zefo, an online marketplace specializing in second hand and factory second furniture and appliances, has announced that it has raised INR 40 Cr in a round led by Sequoia India, with participation from Beenext and existing investor Helion Ventures. The company provides high-quality used goods that are verified through a stringent quality control and assessment process.

The latest funding will allow Zefo to diversify into new geographies and categories and extend its reach in existing categories. It will also use this fund to invest in technology and build a talent pool.

Zefo promises a completely hassle-free and professional used goods shopping experience to buyers and sellers. Unlike existing online classifieds, they provide a high degree of standardization through quality checks as well as managing end-to-end logistics, in an otherwise unorganized sector, thereby adding a layer of trust and convenience to this unstructured second hand goods market. To sellers, Zefo provides a fair price, upfront cash, flexible pickups and a completely hassle-free and professional experience.

“The household goods are a $40-50bn marketplace and the market is growing rapidly. Zefo is currently growing at a rate of 40% every month. Since our launch, we have already served 30,000+ customers, selling 400-500 products a day. Our ambition is to expand into new categories and cities in the next one year and to be the preferred shopping destination for used goods”, says Rohit Ramasubramanian, co-founder of Zefo.

Our proposition of high-quality products at an affordable price is finding tremendous validation in a rapidly expanding market for second hand consumer durables in India. We cater to the needs of today’s smart consumer looking for a quality lifestyle at a reasonable price.” he added.

“Zefo’s USP lies in its ability to bring the element of trust, reliability, and convenience in a market where these have been largely ignored. Their exceptional net promoter score is a testament to how well the service is resonating with both buyers and sellers on the platform”, according to Abheek Anand, Principal, Sequoia Capital India Advisors.

With services are available in Bangalore, Mysore, Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida and Mumbai, the company currently offers televisions, refrigerators, washing machines and microwaves under the appliances category and beds, sofas, dining tables, etc. in the furniture category.