Fynd Raises $500K from Silicon Valley Based Rocketship, Series A Funding Totals $1M

Underlining its commitment to offer superior customer experiences with real time fashion discovery, Fynd, the unique fashion e-commerce portal, recently raised follow-up funds of $500,000 from Silicon Valley-based Rocketship. This new capital has been raised in an extension of the Series A funding round wherein the fashion e-commerce portal had raised $500k from Venture Catalysts in March. Fynd seeks to chiefly utilise the funds to strengthen its tech backbone, optimize its operations and further enhance its customer offerings as well as strategies. Fynd will leverage the VC firm’s expertise in data mining and machine learning capabilities to emerge as a household name in the fashion e-commerce space.

The Series A funding comes close on the heels of the company’s undisclosed amount of capital raised from Snapdeal’s former Chief Product Officer, Anand Chandrasekaran. Rajiv Mehta, Chief Executive Officer of Arvind Sports Lifestyle Ltd., and Ramakant Sharma, ex- VP Engineering,Myntra and Co-Founder of Livspace. Currently, Fynd has 3.5 million styles live on its app and website and soon plans to roll out 3.5 million units more. Fynd also holds the largest inventory and offers a variety of styles from different categories. Through its technology and constant innovations, the fashion portal has been able to scale up in a successful manner.

Commenting on the follow-up funds received, Fynd Co-founder, Harsh Shah said, “This follow-up investment proves that our compelling vision of emerging as the one-stop fashion e-commerce portal is soon to become a reality. Rocketship is the perfect match to help take Fynd to its next level of growth. The VC firm will help create value for Fynd by regularly monitoring our data, comparing it with our competitors and the market and sharing their insights with us. We’re excited to grow with the support of our investors not only through their capital infusion but also through their extensive domain knowledge and vast strategic experiences.”

Sailesh Ramakrishnan, Partner, Rocketship said, ”Fynd unlocks the inventory in the store to get you exactly what you need with the convenience of an app. They are revolutionizing offline to online retail! Through its technology and constant innovations, it has tremendous potential in the Indian market. With further infusion of funds, Fynd is sure to disrupt the fashion e-commerce space. Rocketship is happy to be a part of its growth story.”

Rocketship leverages data science and machine learning to identify companies with a sustainable growth engine at their core. It was the thumping success of Fynd’s EOSS campaign (The Grand Brand Sale) held in July 2016 that caught the attention of the VC firm. Rocketship received an indication about the enormous response that Fynd was getting during the sale period on its portal and decided to invest in it. The firm’s founders, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, previously co-founded Kosmix, a social search and data start-up that was acquired by Walmart in 2011. They also launched search start-up Junglee, which was acquired by Amazon in 1998, and they later played key roles in developing Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Omni Channel Enabler Ace Turtle Raises $5M in Series A Funding from Vertex Ventures and C31 Ventures

Ace Turtle, an omni-channel platform company in India, has raised Series A funding from Singapore based Vertex Ventures and C31 Ventures, the venture capital arm of CapitaLand. The round will fetch them over $5 million given Vertex typically like to invest around $3 to 5 million in select companies.

Ace Turtle with its proprietary platform integrates online and offline retail channels automating and optimising Omni-Channel fulfilment. The platform provides brands with a single view of customer and a single view of inventory. Ace Turtle’s technology helps drastically reduce the costs and complexity of omni-channel transformation for enterprise retail clients by using the framework of their legacy systems.

Ace Turtle’s clients include brands such as Puma, Ray-Ban, Max, Arrow, Flying Machine, Ed Hardy, US Polo, Fossil and more.

"We see increasing demand for omni-channel solutions in India and in International markets. With our proprietary platform that is designed to adapt to evolving trends, we provide our clients with the tools to enable a seamless commerce experience for their customers. We endeavour to leverage Vertex’s expertise in scaling up tech companies, and accelerate growth in South East Asia with CapitaLand. The funds raised will be applied toward the building of the leadership team, augment our technology platform, and toward an aggressive expansion of our customer base in India and overseas,” says Nitin Chhabra, CEO of Ace Turtle.

With the Singapore Government’s Temasek Holdings as its parent organization, Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India invests in high growth startups seeking their first or second round of institutional venture capital funding across Asia, with a focus on Singapore, Indonesia, Taiwan and India, among other emerging hubs of innovation in this region. Vertex Ventures typically invests in Series A and B rounds, and are open to both leading and co-investing with other value-add investors. Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India has helped its companies raise multiple rounds of financing after our initial investment such as Grab, FirstCry, Yatra, Paktor, Reebonz, among many others.

C31 Ventures is the corporate venture arm of CapitaLand. It invests in technology startups adjacent to CapitaLand's core businesses and those that can provide new strategic capabilities. By leveraging the group's significant asset base and extensive global market network in shopping malls, serviced residences, offices and homes it provides an unparalleled access to its portfolio companies. The $110 million global fund typically invests in Series A to C companies across SEA, China, India and US.

Logistics Startup Blowhorn Raises Rs 25 Cr in Series A Round of Funding

Intra-city logistics startup Blowhorn has raised $3.65 million (Rs 25 crores) in series A funding from IDG Ventures India, together with the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation and existing investors, Draper Associates and Unitus Seed Fund. The company plans to utilize the investment to expand operations to 8 cities in the next 24 months, with over 25,000 daily active drivers.

Blowhorn’s tech-enabled platform connects customers to mini-truck owners, enabling intra-city, sub 2-ton deliveries in a hassle-free, reliable and transparent manner. Founded by Mithun Srivatsa and Nikhil Shivaprasad, who have a deep expertise of over two decades in logistics and technology, Blowhorn is effectively aggregating and streamlining India’s fragmented logistics market that currently has over 1.8 mn mini-trucks in urban centers alone.

For Tim Draper’s new fund ‘Draper Associates’, Blowhorn is the first Series A bet in India. Commenting on the company’s fund raise and growth, Mithun Srivatsa, Co-Founder and CEO, Blowhorn, said, “We have been able to leverage technology and operational innovation to emerge as a market leader by ensuring high business profitability and customer satisfaction. We will now focus on leading the segment across all performance metrics, and are fortunate to have investors who share our vision.”

The company’s superior technology improves drivers’ capacity utilization by connecting them to customers (through website and mobile app), enables real time/spot management, reduces fuel costs and time significantly - leading to high customer satisfaction and successfully doubling drivers’ incomes. Blowhorn also has a unique comprehensive driver-training program, wherein all drivers are trained in customer service.

Founded in 2014, Blowhorn started with 2 employees and has now scaled to 50 full-time employees. Its innovative campaigns such as 1-hour delivery of mobile phones in partnership with OnePlus and #UberIceCream deliveries with Uber, have enabled Blowhorn to work with several cutting-edge companies across India. In less than 2 years, Blowhorn has expanded to provide services across Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad.

“There have been many attempts at solving India’s intra-city logistics challenge—Blowhorn’s extensive use of technology and business level innovation has helped build a strong, rapidly-growing business with industry leading margins in a highly capital efficient manner. Blowhorn has the potential to be a dominant solutions provider of last mile logistics for SMEs and rapidly growing businesses.” Said Karthik Prabhakar, Director, IDG Ventures India Advisors.

Commenting on their participating in this financing round, Rahil Rangwala, Director, Family Economic Stability at the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, said, “One of India’s major challenges is to provide market-relevant skills and meaningful jobs to its large, young and growing workforce. Our investment in Blowhorn gives us an opportunity to improve the income of intra-city truck drivers, who are mostly youth. We are excited to support Blowhorn’s effort in making informal sector jobs more attractive for India’s underprivileged youth, which also fulfills the goals of the government’s Skill India initiative.”

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.

Tpot Gets Pre Series A Funding to Fuel Continued Expansion; to Raise Series A by June 2017

Tpot, a startup specialized in ‘Chai-Nashta’ segment has announced the closing of their Pre Series A Funding from Ashish Gupta,Founder & Trustee of Ashoka University and Ex-Co-founder & COO of Evalueserve and the principal investor at Tpot café.

With the infused funding, Tpot plans to expand its presence by opening 19 more outlets by the year end and 150-200 outlets in at least 4-5 cities by March 2018. Having created its niche in the corporate houses like MakeMyTrip, goibibo, BPTP Park Centra, World Trade Tower; Tpot further eyes expansion into this space.

Tpot, which currently has 21 outlets across Delhi/ NCR will add 19 new outlets at the corporate offices, metro stations and hospitals, following the model of being highly accessible to the customers. The idea of Tpot was initiated by a team of three young corporate individuals, (CA’s and MBA), who turned into food entrepreneurs for their love of chai-nashta. Going by its current revenue figure of Rs 6 crores, the company has set itself a target of Rs 12 crores by March 2017.

Speaking on the recent development, Robin Jha, Co-Founder and CEO, Tpot stated ,“We plan to realize the target in a phased manner by opening over 40 outlets by the year end, and is also planning a multi-city launches by opening 150-200 outlets by 2018. Besides, the company is also expected to introduce varied range of packaged tea and delivery of refreshments at home. Through its offerings, Tpot wants to be a part of the growing story of health and wellness market in India.”

“The concept of Tpot Cafe of reaching to everyone at the same time is unique to the market, and has resulted in extremely rapid growth to date. We are excited to extend our association with the team as they continue to strengthen their market leadership and drive further exciting growth opportunities,” said Ashish.

Established in December 2013, TPot Café is on its way to become a pioneer of Tea culture in Delhi.

Bizongo Raises $3M in Series A Round from IDG Ventures and Accel Partners

B2B packaging marketplace Bizongo has announced a $3M Series A round of funding from IDG Ventures and existing investor Accel Partners.

Bizongo is based out of Mumbai, and was established by IIT Bombay and IIT Delhi alumni in 2015. Bizongo is the sole online B2B marketplace in the $17Bn+ complex packaging industry in India. Bizongo currently deals in products such as boxes, containers, pouches, bags etc which is frequently required in several industries such Food & Hospitality, FMCG, Retail & Wholesale, Ecommerce and several others. The company has served more than 3000 businesses in the last year. Bizongo platform aims to make business procurement an efficient and hassle-free process. Custom packaging and branding options are also available on the platform itself. Unbranded nature of products, lack of pricing standardization and heavy supply side fragmentation further ensures that Bizongo is able to add value through its online platform with very clear and transparent product listings.

The company plans to use the funds raised in expanding its seller base, building automation and improving its supply chain. The company also wants to expand its talent pool especially in the technology and operations domains.

Bizongo is also looking to partner with large corporates especially in retail and manufacturing and handle their procurement process end-to-end. “We are really excited to see what the future holds for us” says Founder and CEO, Aniket Deb.

“A B2B purchase is distinctly different from a consumer purchase. Businesses purchasing from us trust our in-depth catalogue, quality, on-time delivery and ease of purchase – and not just best price. The best part of our business is that we get over 50% of our monthly revenues from repeat customers.” revealed Aniket.

“We partnered with Bizongo in mid-2015 in their seed round. Bizongo has grown 100x in the last one year and has become a great example of a modern B2B commerce marketplace, that leverages technology to make business more convenient – in a very complex vertical that is packaging” – Prayank Swaroop, Principal, Accel.

“Packaging forms a very fundamental element of almost all business. With over 28,000 vendors in India the supply chain is extremely fragmented, IDGVI is very excited to partner with this team to build the largest platform for packaging materials in the country “ said Ranjith Menon Executive Director, IDG Ventures India.

Diagnostic and Wellness Startup Healthians.com Raises $3M in Series A Round Led by BEENEXT

Healthians.com, a diagnostic and wellness startup has announced that it has raised $3 million (Rs 20 Crores) in Series A Round of Funding led by BEENEXT along with Digital Garage, Japan, BEENOS and others. The company raised its seed round last year in July from YouWecan ventures.

Healthians.com technology-led asset light model merges international quality benchmarks of branded labs with the scalability & efficiency of marketplaces. The operational model involves working in close partnership with lab owners to significantly increase lab capacity utilization, upgrade to high-quality infrastructure and implement a proprietary 52 point technology-led quality management system in order to ensure high-quality results. The cost savings from increased and consistent sample volumes are then passed on to the customer, resulting in lowest prices in the market.

Anuj Mittal, Co-Founder, Healthians.com added, “Ensuring reliability, quality and accuracy in Diagnostics is a complex science with possibility of failure at more than 50 points in the chain. Even the best known labs despite certification, suffer from inconsistencies. With deep expertise gained in this domain, we are creating cutting-edge technology that will ensure accuracy across all aspects of diagnostics from home collection to lab testing and we will look to automate the entire operation matrix as well. Married with our unique asset light business model of deep partnerships, not only does this allow us to scale rapidly, but it also gives us unparalleled unit economics.”

Healthians.com gets over 1000 booking requests every single day from Delhi/NCR alone and has collected over 30,000 samples last month. The platform has conducted over a million diagnostic tests and has served over 150,000 customers in the Delhi/NCR region. The company has it’s own team of over 200+ phlebotomists in Delhi NCR alone, making it the largest home collection service in the country.

Speaking of the funding, Deepak Sahni, Founder, Healthians.com said “We spent the last few months putting the entire operations and quality piece into processes will be automating everything possible. I am glad that Healthians.com revenue is by far the highest while we are still in Delhi/NCR as compared to other players in the space. We have been getting continuous support and confidence from our Investors and this round adds great validation to our model. By 2019, we will be India’s largest diagnostic brand”

The company’s direct to customer approach offers free doorstep sample collection service through its certified and trained team of sample collectors and transporting the samples to the nearest Healthians lab. Customers can book a broad range of tests with an option to create customized packages for their exact requirements, while still availing the benefits of package pricing. These services along with the quality-focused approach ensure the complete reliability of test results leading to high repeats.

Teruhide Sato, Founder and Managing Partner, BEENEXT said “I met Deepak in November last year and invested a small amount through convertible notes and finally decided to lead this round after witnessing tremendous growth shown by the business in all aspects. I see a real sustainable business being created which is there to stay long. Diagnostics is a huge market in India and has room for many more players. Healthian’s unique model with focus on quality, cost and customer experience is highly scalable and expandable to other markets.”

The future plan of the company includes creating the largest umbrella brand in the country by adding over 200 labs and 3000+ phlebotomists to its existing network across 30 cities over the next 12-18 months. The business aims to grow swiftly to achieve 5,00,000 monthly sample load by the end of 2017.

“We would like to stay focused on diagnostics for another 12 months. We have built necessary technology and roadmap for expanding our offerings towards other healthcare services in future. Having the largest medical fleet on the street for home sample collection enables us to offer many more healthcare services to our customers. This will be new and game changing for the specific industry” added the founders.

Fashion Brand FabAlley Raises $2M in Series A Round Led by India Quotient

Noida-based online fashion store FabAlley has raised $2 million in its Series A round of funding led by India Quotient with participation from its existing investors - Indian Angel Network and social entrepreneur Ranjan Sharma. The company aims to utilize the newly raised funding to expand its offline reach and scale up its product offerings. It will also be used for marketing and brand management.

Online-to-offline fashion platform, FabAlley was founded in 2012 by Shivani Poddar and Tanvi Malik. FabAlley which currently retails via Central, Future Group’s fashion chain, has about 25 live stores with Central and 45 more in the pipeline. "We will be wrapping up (expansion of our Central stores) by Jan 2017," Tanvi Malik, cofounder of FabAlley said, reported ET.

"We will be expanding to categories such as lingerie and fitness wear. We will also expand our accessories portfolio to include bags, shoes, fashion jewellery as well as grow our 2 sub brands — Curve & Indya," added Malik.

Speaking about the investment, Madhukar Sinha, partner at India Quotient said, "Eventually, to reach scale you have to be present everywhere; on your own website, marketplaces and offline stores. We believe that it will be much more capital-efficient than some of the pure offline stores or brands."

Other startups which operates in the fashion retail segment are StalkBuyLove, Findow, Voonik, Fynd, Purplle and Roposo among others. Earlier last month, StalkBuyLove raised an undisclosed amount of funding from William Bissell, Managing Director of ethnic retailer Fabindia and in the same month Findow also received an undisclosed amount of funding from Raj Singh Bhandal, Director, Next Media Works.

IQLECT Gears up for Series A Round, Set to Launch Cloud Offering During Next Week’s VLDB Conference

Real time data analytics company IQLECT, the big data startup from Bangalore, founded by Ex-CTO of Jabong.com Sachin Sinha is set to raise Series A round of funding. In July 2015, the company raised US$2 million in seed funding from Exfinity Venture Partners. Exfinity venture partners is backed by software industry veterans such as Ex-Infosys directors TV Mohandas Pai & V. Balakrishnan among others. Recently, Lip-Bu Tan, founder of Silicon Valley-based Walden International and CEO of Cadence Design Systems; Michael Marks, former CEO of Flextronics and founding partner at Riverwood Capital; and Nicolas Braithwaite, founding partner at Riverwood Capital and former Flextronics CTO, have invested in their individual capacity too. The company has so far used these funds to build a world class product, both for cloud and on premise. With next round of funding IQLECT will be expanding the geographical reach and building a line-up of clients in e-commerce, financial services, media and telecommunication industries

IQLECT provides a ready-to-use software converged platform, for users to enable real-time data analysis for their businesses, in a cost-effective and process-efficient manner. IQLECT in partnership with Dell offers fully baked up, all-in-box solution that contains all necessary software pieces, which can be hosted on premise by enterprises. IQLECT is also set to launch the cloud offering during VLDB conference next week. VLDB (Very Large Data Bases) is an International forum for database researchers, vendors, practitioners, application developers, and users. The conference which is slated to be held in India after 20 years from 5th to 9th September in Delhi will feature research talks, tutorials, demonstrations, and workshops. VLDB conference is backed by Facebook, Google and LinkedIn among others and thousands of big data enthusiasts are set to visit this year.  V. Balakrishnan, Partner and Chairman of Exfinity ventures noted that, launching enterprise grade cloud product is an important milestone in the journey of IQLECT and businesses small or big can deploy real time analysis solution with a click of a button and take decisions for the desired business outcome

IQLECT’s cloud offering help simplifies the overall proposition to start getting insights with real-time data and analysis in less than few hours. The real-time stack for analysis could be launched in few clicks by the user in a fully featured manner. For corporations, IQLECT is a perfect fit since it offers an end to end solution with Ingest, Process, Store, Visualize, Act, Correlate, Notify all built in to the product. The product’s data visualization capability with intuitive and configurable dashboard paves way for predictive analytics and makes it easy to run different workflows for diverse business processes.

Looking ahead at the cloud offering launch, Sachin Sinha, Founder & CEO, IQLECT, says, "We are delighted to officially launch our cloud offering during VLDB 2016 conference. It’s an important opportunity for us to showcase our product to industry peers and big data experts during VLDB 2016.

RentoMojo Raises $5M in Series A Round from Accel Partners and IDG Ventures India

RentoMojo, Indian online rental-solutions company headquartered in Bangalore, has announced its latest fund raise of $5 million in Series A from IDG Ventures and Accel Partners, India. The funds raised will be used to further strengthen the product and data driven structure within the company.

Since its inception in November 2014, RentoMojo has expanded to four cities including Delhi, Mumbai, Pune & Bangalore. Founded by IIT Alumni Geetansh Bamania, RentoMojo aims to create awareness about ‘renting’ and ‘access lifestyle’ as a concept in the consumer consideration set. The company is anchored on an asset-light and fintech model that makes it a scalable business venture in the startup ecosystem.

Commenting on the funding, Geetansh Bamania said, “The way access-economy is shaping up in our country, there is a need to generate awareness around this concept; we want our users to indulge in the benefits of curated, personalized lifestyle without actually owning it. Apart from the cities we are operating in currently, we plan to expand to two more cities in the coming quarter. We are growing at a breakneck pace of 30% MoM growth and we hope to continue on this growth trajectory.”

“We strongly believe that product-renting business has a huge potential in India given the growth in inter-city migrant population.  RentoMojo is capturing this market in an asset-light way, which we believe is the best approach to building a large scalable company.  We continue to remain very impressed with the team’s focus on building operational excellence using technology and are happy to back them in this exciting growth phase”, said, Venkatesh Peddi, Executive Director, IDG Ventures India.

"By combining a wide selection of home-essentials along with a unique business model RentoMojo, is successfully transforming the lives of today’s millennials. The rental commerce market is growing in India and it is great to see this innovative startup at the forefront of this booming category. We are happy to have partnered with Rentomojo again and look forward to working with them as they continue to scale and offer value to a new generation of online consumers", said Prashanth Prakash, Accel Partners.

Prior to this, RentoMojo had raised $2 million in Pre-Series A from Accel Partners and IDG Ventures, India in November, 2015.

Image - Co-founders Ajay Nain & Geetansh Bamania

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

Online Health and Wellness Startup CureJoy Raises $4.4M Series A Funding Led by Accel Partners India

Online health and wellness startup CureJoy has raised $4.4 million in Series A round led by existing investor Accel Partners India. Several other unnamed investors also participated in the round. Last year in September, Curejoy had raised $1.15 million in funding from Accel Partners.

The startup will use the funds to grow the healthcare verticals it focuses on—fitness, beauty and nutrition; strengthen the team and build a strong tech infrastructure with an emphasis on video content.

San Francisco- and Bangalore-based CureJoy, an online community that connects users with alternative medicine experts, provides curated content on natural health and wellness, mostly in the preventive healthcare segment. With the newly raised capital, it plans to grow the existing verticals and create small business units across six-seven sub-verticals including yoga, pregnancy, recipe and more and explore more advertisement-based revenue streams around video content.

CureJoy primarily targets the US market with natural health content with a focus on preventive healthcare.

The startup doesn’t charge users currently, but plans to launch personalised preventive healthcare services on a freemium model towards the end of this year or early next year. Also, it plans to launch Spanish language content to target Spanish-speaking population in Europe and the Americas.

It plans to partner with experts like Deepak Chopra, offering each expert a dedicated channel on the platform. Initially,  CureJoy was started as a Q&A portal where people could ask questions on health issues then it began providing curated content from experts.

The portal currently has over 5,000 experts from various streams of natural health science, including yoga, ayureveda, naturopathy and traditional Chinese medicine, including acupuncture and acupressure. The firm aims to take the number to 50,000 by 2017.

The startup claims that it has about 14 million monthly visits, growing 100% quarter-on-quarter and expects the website traffic to touch 25 million by this year end.

CureJoy competes with portals like Everyday Health Inc, WebMD, an online portal offering medical news and information and lifestyle media brand Mind Body Green.

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Online Marketplace For Used Cars Carro Raises $5.3M Led by Venturra Capital

Carro, Singapore based online marketplace for used cars, has raised $5.3 million in a Series A round led by Lippo Group-backed venture firm Venturra Capital. Participating investors from Indonesia, Singapore, Japan and China included Singtel Innov8, Golden Gate Ventures, Alpha JWC, Skystar Ventures and GMO Ventures. With this new funding, the company plans to expand into Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand by the end of 2016.

The company which was formed in November 2015 by five former Information Development Authority (IDA) Singapore National Infocomm Scholars, is a peer-to-peer car marketplace that helps direct owners buy and sell cars faster and at a great price. It is based on various algorithms which allows users to buy and sell used cars.

With Carro, buying and selling a used car can be easy, it help you with the transfer, car loan and insurance process every step of the way. Carro provides the entire white glove service of end to end car inspection. The company offers a wide range of cars that are direct owner and have been certified by its trained mechanic.

The firm generates its revenue through commissions from partnerships with finical institutions like banks and insurance companies. A $183 fee is charged if a car gets sold via the Carro platform.

The company claims to have grown at a rate of 30 percent month-on-month since the launch and plans to hit gross merchandise run rate of SG$100 million by end of this year. In November 2015, the company had also secured SG$1 million in seed round.

Apart from funding, the firm also launched Carro Workshop, a mobile app that recommends workshops to car owners based on pricing, location and service preferences.

Kalaari Capital Invests $2M in Financial Technology Startup CreditVidya

CreditVidya, a financial technology startup that harnesses the power of non-traditional data to provide credit scores to millions of unscored Indians, has raised $2 million in Series A funding from Kalaari Capital. The investment will support CreditVidya’s plans to continuously advance their technology platform and launch additional products that help lenders approve more customers, minimize fraud rates and accelerate verification processes of potential customers.

Speaking about the investment, Abhishek Agarwal, Co-founder and CEO of CreditVidya said, “Non-traditional internet and mobile data sources provide a rich source of social, behavioural and transactional data which when combined with advanced analytics is fuelling a new wave of credit risk assessment. Our big data platform leverages over 10,000+ such unique digital data points to assess the creditworthiness of a potential borrower. We work very closely with our lending partners to develop customized scorecards for their product offering so that they can approve more creditworthy customers. The goal to drive financial inclusion by enabling access to credit through our technology platform is what motivates us!”

“Currently, credit bureaus rely heavily on traditional data streams such as details of repayment of loans and credit cards to generate credit scores. India’s demographic profile consists primarily of people without a credit history. CreditVidya’s solutions enable lenders to increase profitability by more accurately assessing the credit risk of these new-to-credit customers. We are thrilled to benefit from Kalaari’s expertise in scaling technology businesses to bring fair and transparent credit to millions of Indians.”  added, Rajiv Raj, Co-founder and Director of the firm.

Together, Abhishek and Rajiv bring a wealth of expertise from their backgrounds in credit risk management, data analytics and retail lending. The company’s current clientele includes banks and non-banking financial institutions such as Fullerton India, Bajaj Finserv, IDFC Bank, Tata Capital and Shriram Housing Finance. It has also garnered interest from other verticals such as insurance companies, e-commerce companies and e-wallets.

According to Bala Srinivasa, ‎Partner at Kalaari Capital, “Credit scoring is a major bottleneck in India inhibiting social and economic growth.  Credit Vidya has built unique technology that enables lenders to assess credit risk of 800M+ Indians not covered by traditional credit scoring.  We are excited to partner with CreditVidya in their mission to reimagine credit scoring in India.”

CreditVidya has previously received angel funding from Siddharth Parekh from Paragon Partners and Silicon Valley-based angel investor Munish Mehta.

CreditVidya, is a financial technology startup headquartered in Mumbai. Founded in 2013, CreditVidya’s technology platform uses non-traditional data sources to provide credit scores to hundreds of millions of Indian customers.  The technology platform helps lenders accurately assess risk of new-to-credit and thin file customers.  Lenders benefit from increased approval rates, lower cost of underwriting and more effective product cross-selling and upselling.

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BRIDGEi2i Analytics Solutions Raises Series A Growth Capital

BRIDGEi2i Analytics Solutions, today announced that it has secured Series A growth capital from Edelweiss Private Equity, the Venture Capital and Private Equity arm of Edelweiss Financial Services, one of India’s leading diversified financial services conglomerate.

BRIDGEi2i was founded in 2011 by former GE and HP executives, with the vision of enabling enterprises realize sustainable business impact through data driven insights, leveraging algorithms and technology. BRIDGEi2i has built a significant global customer base, including 10 of the Fortune 100 companies across Technology, Manufacturing, Financial Services, Insurance and Retail sectors.

“This investment will fuel our ability to deliver greater value to customers by enabling us to accelerate the development of our machine learning based business applications along with significant expansion of our consulting teams across the United States and India” says Prithvijit Roy, CEO of BRIDGEi2i. “Our partnership with Edelweiss is exciting because we share the same vision and we look forward to their strategic inputs as we look to grow multi-fold in the next few years” Prithvijit added.

“Big Data and Analytics is becoming a critically important driver for business success across sectors globally. We are impressed by what the BRIDGEi2i has achieved in a relatively short span of time, in transforming large enterprises through their impact driven approach” says Pranav Parikh, head of Private Equity and VC funds, at Edelweiss. “What is unique about BRIDGEi2i is their differentiated offering that blends analytics expertise with technology and a proven leadership team, which positions it well for a non-linear growth trajectory.” Pranav added.

With this investment, Edelweiss has acquired a minority stake in the Company and Pranav Parikh will be joining BRIDGEi2i’s Board. BRIDGEi2i was advised by Sparrow Advisory on this transaction.

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AddressHealth Raises $1.5M in Series A Funding

AddressHealth, Indian primary healthcare network exclusively for children, has announced $1.5 million in Series A funding led by Gray Matters Capital with participation from existing investor, Unitus Seed Fund. The company, which runs innovative school-based neighbourhood clinics and school health programs, will use the investment to expand the model to other schools in Bangalore & other geographies. As per estimates from Unified District Information System for Education, there are more than 2 lakh schools in urban India, a large number of them catering to low and middle income population. Bangalore alone has nearly 2,500 private, unaided schools. By leveraging partnerships with schools, AddressHealth is able to reduce costs associated with retail healthcare while simultaneously increasing the reach of affordable preventive healthcare.

The disruptive 'School Clinic' model

AddressHealth, which is currently Bangalore's largest school health provider, has reached more than 1 lakh children through on-site services and screening programs to identify health issues and provided early intervention to prevent them from suffering as young adults.

Mrs. Sashi Anand, Principal of Pratibha Bala Mandira school said, “I am very glad that our institution is associated with AddressHealth since 2011. A team of committed doctors and nurses are providing comprehensive health programs which comprise thorough health check-ups, health education to students and teachers, environmental audit, counselling and nutrition audit.”

Schools can play a crucial role in pediatric health and their position in providing inclusive health care is a concept that is finding traction, not just in India, but worldwide. “School health programs save lives,” said Hesky Kutscher, Founder & CEO, Caredox, a free digital health tools startup for K12 public schools in the US which recently received $4.3M in venture capital and debt funding.

“With its disruptive market-based model for pediatric healthcare, AddressHealth has served more than 100,000 children already; what I believe to be a fraction of their future potential,” said Bob Pattillo, veteran impact investor and CEO & Founder of Gray Matters Capital. “We are excited to partner in their growth story and scale across India to serve the masses effectively.”

“We believe that the unique and powerful service delivery model in partnership with schools will help AddressHealth scale effectively, not only in providing curative care, but also in providing preventive intervention for infectious & non communicable diseases,” said Dave Richards, Managing Partner at Unitus Seed Fund. “We are happy to partner with them in their growth story as they make India’s children healthier.”

Experienced Healthcare Services Team

AddressHealth was founded by doctor entrepreneurs Anand Lakshman and Anoop Radhakrishnan.

Dr. Anand Lakshman has significant experience leading public health programs that reached more than 1.14 crore (114 million) children. Dr. Anoop Radhakrishnan has been involved with setting up 2 startups soon after his MBA from IIM – Lucknow. The goal of the founders is to address the health of at least 4 lakh children by 2018.

“The funding allows us to expand the reach of our unique model of healthcare, which leverages schools, to deliver comprehensive primary healthcare to children proactively, at a low cost,” said Dr Anand Lakshman, CEO of AddressHealth. “We will use technology to further expand our reach, reduce costs and promote proactive preventive health action by parents and schools, to make children healthier and happier,” added Dr Anoop Radhakrishnan, co-founder of AddressHealth.

Reiterating the importance of preventive care, one of the parents whose child was treated by AddressHealth, Mrs. Megha, said, “Thanks to AddressHealth, my child is now active in sports and I am now confident about him playing out in the open without the fear of an asthma attack. This is possible now as we know what triggers an attack and we are able to safely avoid it.”

Unitus Capital acted as the financial advisor to this transaction while K Law was the legal advisor.

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KNOLSKAPE Raises Series A Funding from Inventus Capital & The HR Fund

[caption id="attachment_105286" align="alignnone" width="707"] Rajiv Jayaraman, Founder & CEO – KNOLSKAPE[/caption]

KNOLSKAPE,​ the Gamification and Simulation software company in talent transformation space, has raised series A funding from Inventus Capital Partners​; a US ­India venture firm managed by successful entrepreneurs & The HR Fund, India’s first human resources (HR) focused private investment company. The investment will be used for international expansion, product innovation and building out global partnerships.

With their extensive experience of scaling up businesses, Inventus Capital will help KNOLSKAPE scale–up their operations globally; The HR Fund at its end will bring in domain expertise and its reach into the global HR community.

Using experiential learning products, KNOLSKAPE helps organizations attract, grow and retain talent. Global Fortune 500 companies, Top­10 B-­schools and leading HR consulting / training companies use KNOLSKAPE’s Gamification and Simulation products and solutions for on­boarding, training, assessments and talent engagement.

According to Rajiv Jayaraman, Founder & CEO – KNOLSKAPE:​ “Both Inventus Capital & The HR FUND with their expertise will help KNOLSKAPE in shaping the future of learning in India. He further added, “Today with the increase in millennial population in corporates, there is huge challenge to engage the workforce. Moreover with the millennial generation set to occupy half of the global workforce (by 2020), HR has realized an immediate need for engaging youngsters. Thus, 'Microlearning' or bite sized lessons in the form of games are a new trend catching up in India.”

According to Vijay Kalangi, Co­founder & CTO – KNOLSKAPE: “Along with global expansion, we will focus on product innovation especially in the areas of HR analytics and mobile platforms. The end goal is to build a formidable team that will revolutionize the way current workforce learns. We want to unlock human potential to help drive organisational performance.”

According to Kulwant Bardh, CEO, APAC – KNOLSKAPE:​"We at KNOLSKAPE have always been passionate about creating cutting edge and futuristic products which will help organizations transform the way their people learn. With the kind of growth we are seeing in South East Asia and China, the funding will enable us to implement our mission at scale. Expanding our presence in new markets is the next big leap that's in store. Exciting times ahead for all us as we reshape the future of learning."

According to Utkarsh Joshi, Principal, The HR Fund, “According to Gartner, the global market for Gamification solutions will be roughly at $5.5 billion by end­2018. Already, global corporations have used it in areas such as customer engagement, loyalty programmes, sales, and are extending it to their internal operations and employees. In India, adoption is often hindered by conventionally ingrained attitudes towards use of such tools at the workplace. But of late, Gamification is being adopted by various corporates to engage the younger workforce.”

Samir Kumar, Managing Director – Inventus commented​, “ Talent plays a key role in the success of companies, and KNOLSKAPE, with its technology powered, gamified learning solutions, helps its clients upskill their talent pool. We're happy to be partnering with a passionate entrepreneur like Rajiv in his journey, and together, hope to build an organization that creates a global impact."

KNOLSKAPE Raises Series A Funding from Inventus Capital & The HR Fund

[caption id="attachment_105286" align="alignnone" width="707"] Rajiv Jayaraman, Founder & CEO – KNOLSKAPE[/caption]

KNOLSKAPE,​ the Gamification and Simulation software company in talent transformation space, has raised series A funding from Inventus Capital Partners​; a US ­India venture firm managed by successful entrepreneurs & The HR Fund, India’s first human resources (HR) focused private investment company. The investment will be used for international expansion, product innovation and building out global partnerships.

With their extensive experience of scaling up businesses, Inventus Capital will help KNOLSKAPE scale–up their operations globally; The HR Fund at its end will bring in domain expertise and its reach into the global HR community.

Using experiential learning products, KNOLSKAPE helps organizations attract, grow and retain talent. Global Fortune 500 companies, Top­10 B-­schools and leading HR consulting / training companies use KNOLSKAPE’s Gamification and Simulation products and solutions for on­boarding, training, assessments and talent engagement.

According to Rajiv Jayaraman, Founder & CEO – KNOLSKAPE:​ “Both Inventus Capital & The HR FUND with their expertise will help KNOLSKAPE in shaping the future of learning in India. He further added, “Today with the increase in millennial population in corporates, there is huge challenge to engage the workforce. Moreover with the millennial generation set to occupy half of the global workforce (by 2020), HR has realized an immediate need for engaging youngsters. Thus, 'Microlearning' or bite sized lessons in the form of games are a new trend catching up in India.”

According to Vijay Kalangi, Co­founder & CTO – KNOLSKAPE: “Along with global expansion, we will focus on product innovation especially in the areas of HR analytics and mobile platforms. The end goal is to build a formidable team that will revolutionize the way current workforce learns. We want to unlock human potential to help drive organisational performance.”

According to Kulwant Bardh, CEO, APAC – KNOLSKAPE:​"We at KNOLSKAPE have always been passionate about creating cutting edge and futuristic products which will help organizations transform the way their people learn. With the kind of growth we are seeing in South East Asia and China, the funding will enable us to implement our mission at scale. Expanding our presence in new markets is the next big leap that's in store. Exciting times ahead for all us as we reshape the future of learning."

According to Utkarsh Joshi, Principal, The HR Fund, “According to Gartner, the global market for Gamification solutions will be roughly at $5.5 billion by end­2018. Already, global corporations have used it in areas such as customer engagement, loyalty programmes, sales, and are extending it to their internal operations and employees. In India, adoption is often hindered by conventionally ingrained attitudes towards use of such tools at the workplace. But of late, Gamification is being adopted by various corporates to engage the younger workforce.”

Samir Kumar, Managing Director – Inventus commented​, “ Talent plays a key role in the success of companies, and KNOLSKAPE, with its technology powered, gamified learning solutions, helps its clients upskill their talent pool. We're happy to be partnering with a passionate entrepreneur like Rajiv in his journey, and together, hope to build an organization that creates a global impact."