Luxury Vacation Rental Platform ELIVAAS Raises ₹87 Crore in Series B Round Led by Vertex Ventures

ELIVAAS, a leading luxury vacation rental platform, has successfully raised INR 87 Crores (approx USD 10.4 Million) in its Series B funding round, led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India. Existing investors Peak XV Partners’ Surge and 3one4 Capital also participated in the round, reinforcing continued confidence in the brand’s growth trajectory and market potential.

Backed by its latest funding round, the company is focused on deepening its market penetration by doubling down on its presence in high-potential leisure and business travel destinations across India. ELIVAAS also aims to expand its global footprint and strengthen brand visibility in India and international markets, reinforcing its position as a leading player in the luxury vacation rental ecosystem. ELIVAAS also plans to invest in cutting-edge technology to fuel its next stage of growth, boosting operational performance, transforming the customer journey, and strengthening brand growth in an increasingly competitive market.

"We are thrilled to partner with Vertex Ventures SAE & India as we enter this new phase of growth and equally appreciative of the trust placed in us by our early backers Peak XV Partners’ Surge and 3one4 Capital . This round will enable us to not only grow aggressively in India but also lay the groundwork for international expansion. Our focus remains on leveraging technology to ensure seamless, high-quality experiences at scale while strengthening ELIVAAS as a trusted brand in luxury travel," said Mr. Ritwik Khare, Founder and CEO, ELIVAAS.

“We see a fast growing opportunity to leverage second homes supply to provide premium travel experiences in India via alternate accommodation. Elivaas is best suited to capture this market with their technology enabled platform and obsessive commitment to customer experience, which is loved by both home owners and consumers. We at Vertex Ventures SEA & India are excited to partner with Ritwik and Karan on realizing this massive opportunity.” Nikhil Marwaha, Partner, Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India.

Founded in 2023 by travel industry veterans Ritwik Khare and Karan Miglani, ELIVAAS aims to redefine second home ownership and luxury travel. In its Series A round in September 2024, the company raised $5 million, led by 3one4 Capital with participation from Peak XV Surge and angel investors. Over the last 2 years, the funding enabled ELIVAAS to enhance its proprietary technology platform, expand its operations, and launch its premium luxury brand, Privé while continuing to expand both ELIVAAS and Alaya Stays.

The brand currently operates in 30 Indian destinations, with 5X year-on-year growth in revenue in FY 24-25.

The Series B fundraise marks a major milestone for ELIVAAS as it gears up to scale sustainably, backed by a strong technology foundation and a differentiated service proposition.

Vertex Ventures joins Mastercard and Arkam Ventures as Latest Investors in Signzy; Expands Latest Round to US $8.4 Mn

Vertex Ventures joins Mastercard and Arkam Ventures as latest investors in Signzy; Expands Latest Round to US$8.4M

Signzy plans to invest the funds in building the AI platform for Financial Services

Signzy Founders

Bangalore, December 2, 2020: No code AI platform Signzy announced today that it has raised an additional US$ 3M from Vertex Ventures, taking its latest round of fundraising to $8.4M in total. Signzy announced last month that it raised US$5.4M in a financing round led by Arkam Ventures and Mastercard. Signzy's existing investors, Kalaari Capital and Stellaris Venture Partners also participated in the round.
Signzy offers a 'no code AI platform' that helps financial service companies automate risk and compliance processes. The company plans to invest in strengthening its AI platform and expanding its global sales team in order to serve the rapidly growing demand for its solutions. The startup's product team of 120+ people is based in Bangalore and is focused on building an AI platform to cater to the needs of a fast changing global financial services industry.

Piyush Kharbanda, Partner, Vertex Ventures says, "Signzy has built a differentiated expertise in AI within a short period. Signzy team has executed an ambitious global strategy with great success so far. We are thrilled to back this exceptional team as they build the next generation AI platform for financial services."

Signzy has built a strong global partnership with Mastercard and has launched offices in New York and Dubai to serve its customers in the two key markets of North America and Middle-East respectively. The company now aims to expand its international presence in other markets.

Zahir Khoja, Executive Vice President, Merchant Solutions and Partnerships at Mastercard said, "In a global effort to create a digital first experience for our customers, Mastercard is enabling solutions and partnerships such as Signzy to enable faster growth for acquirers, their payment facilitators, and the businesses we serve today. Our goal is to support accelerated growth of the acceptance ecosystem by working together with such partners and scaling strong technologies like smart merchant onboarding."

Ankit Ratan, co-founder of Signzy says, "We are glad to receive such tremendous support from our investors, and their faith and trust in us is a great encouragement for the entire Signzy team to double down on executing the next phase of our growth strategy." 


About Vertex Ventures

Vertex Ventures is a global network of operator-investors who manage portfolios in the U.S., China, Israel, India and Southeast Asia. The firm is a trusted partner to some of the world's most innovative entrepreneurs, supporting them with unmatched operating experience and deep access to the capital, talent, partners and customers they need to build truly global businesses. Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India invests in high-growth startups seeking institutional venture capital funding across Asia (excluding China), with a focus on Singapore, India, Indonesia and other emerging hubs of innovation in the region. As part of Temasek Holdings, Vertex enjoys close relationships with the region's top decision makers, talent and influencers. For more information, go to http://www.vertexventures.com/southeast-asia-india/

Signzy is a 'no code AI platform' for financial services. No matter how complex a workflow or operation may be, Signzy is able to completely automate the back-office operations decision-making process into a real-time API. This is possible due to a combination of Nebula — a no-code AI model builder (our product) and a Fintech API Marketplace of over 240+ APIs.

Today, Signzy works with over 140 banking and financial services companies globally including the 4 largest banks in India and a Top 3 acquiring Bank in the US.

Nexus backed Hasura Raises $9.9 Mn in Funding led by Vertex Ventures US

Hasura, the San Francisco and Bangalore-based company providing data access and data flow tools and services via GraphQL APIs announced today that it has raised $9.9 million in Series A funding led by Vertex Ventures US. The round also saw participation from SAP.iO Fund, the early-stage venture arm of SAP, existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Strive VC. Several angels also participated, including James Tamplin (founder of Firebase), Sam Lambert (VP of Infrastructure Engineering at GitHub), Amod Malvia (co-founder of Udaan, ex CTO Flipkart), and Michael Stoppelman (ex-SVP of Engineering at Yelp).

GraphQL has emerged as an API solution to accelerate product and data delivery and is beloved by API consumers and application developers. Hasura automatically generates a real-time GraphQL API using declarative metadata configuration and authorization policies that gives consumers instant use. Hasura’s event engine makes it easy to integrate cloud-native/serverless business logic to the GraphQL API. This allows organizations and teams to use GraphQL in production and mission-critical applications (alongside existing and modern cloud-native infrastructure) without the significant cost of building and maintaining a GraphQL server.

Building GraphQL APIs in enterprise (where a majority of use-cases are platform-centric and data-centric) has been challenging. It creates complexity for engineers who struggle to keep databases from being swamped by malformed queries which can cause outages and delays, not to mention security/privacy concerns.

Hasura’s technology, powered by a highly concurrent just-in-time compiler, can process GraphQL queries and efficiently map them into queries to multiple underlying systems (like SQL databases, REST APIs etc). This approach allows Hasura to perform user-given transformations, apply security policies and implement caching requirements in an efficient and scalable way that is cloud-native. Front end engineers, often the consumers of a GraphQL API, truly feel the power of ‘serverless’ design with GraphQL+Hasura. Hasura’s enterprise product also adds GraphQL API management and governance features, including monitoring, traffic management and testing, and integrations for SSO and APM vendors.

Stoplight, an API Design Management Platform, moved their boilerplate GraphQL and authorization into Hasura from their own GraphQL server. “Hasura has significantly reduced the time our engineers spend writing boilerplate GraphQL code. However, what really drove adoption of Hasura at Stoplight is the powerful and flexible permissions system it provides out of the box, and how easy it is to incrementally introduce to an existing tech stack,” said Marc MacLeod, Founder & CEO at Stoplight.



“Hasura’s out-of-the-box support for real-time data via GraphQL subscriptions, granular access-control system and support for geospatial data has dramatically accelerated our efforts to modernize our data access layer for internal API consumers,” says Dr. Andreas Sindlinger, Solution Architect at Jeppesen (A Boeing Company).

Hasura’s open-source traction and developer adoption has grown steadily, crossing over 28M downloads and 15k GitHub stars. The Hasura GraphQL engine was one of last year’s fastest-growing projects as per the 2019 JavaScript Rising Stars report. Hasura has seen widespread adoption across some of the world’s most exciting organizations, from fast-growing startups to Fortune 500 enterprises, including some of the largest healthcare and financial services organizations.

“Hasura makes it possible for front-end teams to use GraphQL and move fast without breaking things on the back-end,” said Sandeep Bhadra, Partner at Vertex Ventures US. “We invested because of the incredible velocity of their product engineering, the tremendous community the founders built in such short order, and the pull from enterprises who want to empower their engineers to move with FAANG-like agility while supporting ops teams with performance management, security, and data access.”

With this funding, Hasura will invest heavily in engineering and product development, notably providing more ready-made integrations with databases and other data sources, in addition to hiring across sales and marketing.

“Hasura has an amazing fit with Postgres and the Postgres vendor ecosystem including new age distributed SQL Postgres vendors,” said Tanmai Gopal, CEO and co-founder at Hasura. “While we double down on the Postgres ecosystem, these funds will help us bring the Hasura and GraphQL experience to other databases to mobilize data in organizations by making high-performance and secure data access a reality.”

Temasek's Vertex Holdings Raises $230 Mn for 4th South-East Asia Fund

Vertex Venture Holdings raised US$230 million in the first close of its fourth Southeast Asian fund to back technology startups across the region and India.

The Singapore-based venture capital arm of Temasek Holdings plans to finalise the funding in the next few months, which could take it above the first close, said Chua Kee Lock, managing partner of Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India.

Most of the investors in its third fund, including Cathay Financial Holding, have backed the new one.

After the success of its bet on ride-hailing app Grab, now Southeast Asia's most valuable startup, Vertex plans to continue backing early-stage technology for financial services, enterprise and consumers in the region.

The net internal rate of return of its third Southeast Asian and Indian fund, which started in 2016, was 45.2 per cent as of December, according to a presentation to investors.

"Our investors have shown confidence in us by participating in the first closing, which hit the initial target of the fund," Mr Chua said.

"The reality is that there are some concerns about the trade war and valuations and the fundraising environment is getting harder."

Earlier Vertex investments include online shopping store FirstCry.com; InstaReM, a cross-border digital payments startup; Validus, an online financing marketplace; and Binance Asia, a cryptocurrency exchange platform.

The VC firm got its start three decades ago and Mr Chua joined as chief executive officer of Vertex Venture Holdings in 2008 and expanded it into a global operation with US$2.5 billion under management as of October.

Today, it manages portfolios in China, Israel, India, Southeast Asia and the US.

The new fund comes amid a flurry of fundraising activities in the region. Jungle Ventures is currently raising a US$200 million fund, while Golden Gate Ventures has teamed up with South Korea's Hanwha Asset Management to raise a US$200 million fund.

This news was first appeared in The Business Times (Singapore)

Ex-Flipkart Execs' App Personalization Platform Hansel.io Raises $4 Mn from Vertex Ventures

Bangalore-based Hansel Software Pvt. Ltd, which own & operates mobile app personalization platform Hansel.io, has raised $4 million (Rs 27.5 crore) in a new funding round led by Vertex Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm backed by Singapore state investment firm Temasek Holdings.

Hansel's existing investors IDG Ventures India and Endiya Partners also participated in this funding round. The startup will use the freshly raised funds to expand its operations to international markets and acquire new talent into its team.

The startup had earlier raised undisclosed amount in a seed round of funding led by Tracxn's angel network TracxnSyndicate as well as from Tracxn Labs and angels including Mekin Maheshwari and Rajesh Sawhney among others, in February 2016. This was followed by $1.35 Mn funding from IDG Ventures and Endiya Partners, in January 2017.

Founded in 2015 by ex-Flipkart executives - Varun Ramamurthy, Parminder Singh and Mudit Mathur, Hansel.io has developed a toolkit for mobile developers that helps them automatically reproduce issues and allows developers to fix crashes at run-time besides communicating customer issues on their app at run-time.

The startup has its flagship toolkit called Hansel's Experience Lake, which allows developers to manage live apps at run-time, with a quick integration process without a code change. With access controls, workflows, and code-free personalization built in, business teams can orchestrate personalized user experiences with enormous speed, at scale, without disrupting engineering roadmap.

On Hansel's funding, Piyush Kharbanda, Executive Director at Vertex Ventures said to e27.com, “Historically, companies have struggled to emulate the rapid pace with which the top four tech giants test and personalize product experiences. Hansel’s technology helps its customers drive new product experiences without getting bottlenecked at code,”

Vertex Ventures invests in early-stage technology companies in Southeast Asia and India across enterprise technology, financial technology and consumer internet. Its Indian portfolio companies include Noida-based SaaS startup Hotelogix, IoT analytics startup Flutura, omni-channel order management firm Ace Turtle, and Cloudcherry, a customer experience management SaaS firm, among others.

Besides Vertex Venture, an another investment firm backed by Singapore's Temasek Holdings, InnoVen Capital, has invested $875,000 in Flintobox, a Chennai-based educational start-up focusing on activity-based learning for kids.

Source - e27.com

[top Image - Hansel.io Team | Via - Iamwire.com]

Ex-Flipkart Execs' App Personalization Platform Hansel.io Raises $4 Mn from Vertex Ventures

Bangalore-based Hansel Software Pvt. Ltd, which own & operates mobile app personalization platform Hansel.io, has raised $4 million (Rs 27.5 crore) in a new funding round led by Vertex Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm backed by Singapore state investment firm Temasek Holdings.

Hansel's existing investors IDG Ventures India and Endiya Partners also participated in this funding round. The startup will use the freshly raised funds to expand its operations to international markets and acquire new talent into its team.

The startup had earlier raised undisclosed amount in a seed round of funding led by Tracxn's angel network TracxnSyndicate as well as from Tracxn Labs and angels including Mekin Maheshwari and Rajesh Sawhney among others, in February 2016. This was followed by $1.35 Mn funding from IDG Ventures and Endiya Partners, in January 2017.

Founded in 2015 by ex-Flipkart executives - Varun Ramamurthy, Parminder Singh and Mudit Mathur, Hansel.io has developed a toolkit for mobile developers that helps them automatically reproduce issues and allows developers to fix crashes at run-time besides communicating customer issues on their app at run-time.

The startup has its flagship toolkit called Hansel's Experience Lake, which allows developers to manage live apps at run-time, with a quick integration process without a code change. With access controls, workflows, and code-free personalization built in, business teams can orchestrate personalized user experiences with enormous speed, at scale, without disrupting engineering roadmap.

On Hansel's funding, Piyush Kharbanda, Executive Director at Vertex Ventures said to e27.com, “Historically, companies have struggled to emulate the rapid pace with which the top four tech giants test and personalize product experiences. Hansel’s technology helps its customers drive new product experiences without getting bottlenecked at code,”

Vertex Ventures invests in early-stage technology companies in Southeast Asia and India across enterprise technology, financial technology and consumer internet. Its Indian portfolio companies include Noida-based SaaS startup Hotelogix, IoT analytics startup Flutura, omni-channel order management firm Ace Turtle, and Cloudcherry, a customer experience management SaaS firm, among others.

Besides Vertex Venture, an another investment firm backed by Singapore's Temasek Holdings, InnoVen Capital, has invested $875,000 in Flintobox, a Chennai-based educational start-up focusing on activity-based learning for kids.

Source - e27.com

[top Image - Hansel.io Team | Via - Iamwire.com]

AI Powered Fintech Startup Active.Ai Raises $8.25 Mn Series A Funding Led by Vertex Ventures

Artificial intelligence emabled fintech startup Active.Ai, that delivers conversational banking through artificial intelligence (AI), announced a US$ 8.25 million Series A financing led by Vertex Ventures, Creditease Holdings and Dream Incubator. Existing investors Kalaari and IDG Ventures India will also participate in the round. Ben Mathias, Managing Partner at Vertex Ventures and Vani Kola, Managing Director at Kalaari Capital will join Sanat Rao from IDG Ventures India on the Company’s board of directors. Anju Patwardhan from Creditease will join as a board observer.

Last year, in November the startup had raised $3 million in funding from IDG Ventures India and Kalaari Capital.

Active.Ai, which is headquartered in Singapore with an innovation lab in Bengaluru, has a proprietary AI engine, Triniti that enables financial institutions to have a meaningful engagement with their customers in an intuitive natural format over multiple apertures covering messaging, voice and IOT devices. This full-stack solution has been built ground-up and comprises Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and Natural Language Generation. Keeping in mind the requirements of financial institutions, the company offers flexibility of deployment: on-premise or in the cloud.

Founded in early 2016, the company is working with some of the top-tier Banks and Insurance companies in India, Malaysia, Singapore and North America and is planning to expand into other verticals like Wealth Management and Securities Trading. The company’s vision is to become the AI platform of choice for leading Financial Services companies across the world.

Ravi Shankar, Co-founder & CEO of Active Intelligence said: “I am excited by the future possibilities of AI and how this technology will shape the banking and financial world. There is very strong need for banks and financial institutions to evolve fast and empower customers with the ability to do transactions as part of their habitual daily micro-conversations. With the fresh injection of funds, Active.ai will scale up and continue to hire talented people for the AI team and focus on building the best enterprise product in the market.”

Ben Mathias from Vertex Ventures said: “I am very excited to partner with the Active.ai team to redefine the paradigm of customer experience in financial services. The threat of fundamental disruption is very real in the financial services space, and companies such as Active.ai are making it easy for incumbents to not just remain relevant, but to get ahead in an ever evolving market. At Vertex, we have been strong believers in Artificial intelligence helping solve problems specific to industry verticals, and that has been a key driver of our decision to partner with Active.ai.”

Vani Kola, Managing Director at Kalaari Capital said “We are very excited to have Vertex, Creditease and Dream Incubator join us in this exciting journey of building a world class AI product from India. The fresh round of funding will help us invest even more into technology and expand our footprint into other geographies.”

“Active.Ai’s NLP platform for conversational banking is rapidly gaining acceptance with key banking customers globally. We continue to be impressed with the passion and capabilities of the team, and are excited to be part of the next phase of their journey,” said Sanat Rao, Partner, IDG Ventures India.

AI Powered Fintech Startup Active.Ai Raises $8.25 Mn Series A Funding Led by Vertex Ventures

Artificial intelligence emabled fintech startup Active.Ai, that delivers conversational banking through artificial intelligence (AI), announced a US$ 8.25 million Series A financing led by Vertex Ventures, Creditease Holdings and Dream Incubator. Existing investors Kalaari and IDG Ventures India will also participate in the round. Ben Mathias, Managing Partner at Vertex Ventures and Vani Kola, Managing Director at Kalaari Capital will join Sanat Rao from IDG Ventures India on the Company’s board of directors. Anju Patwardhan from Creditease will join as a board observer.

Last year, in November the startup had raised $3 million in funding from IDG Ventures India and Kalaari Capital.

Active.Ai, which is headquartered in Singapore with an innovation lab in Bengaluru, has a proprietary AI engine, Triniti that enables financial institutions to have a meaningful engagement with their customers in an intuitive natural format over multiple apertures covering messaging, voice and IOT devices. This full-stack solution has been built ground-up and comprises Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and Natural Language Generation. Keeping in mind the requirements of financial institutions, the company offers flexibility of deployment: on-premise or in the cloud.

Founded in early 2016, the company is working with some of the top-tier Banks and Insurance companies in India, Malaysia, Singapore and North America and is planning to expand into other verticals like Wealth Management and Securities Trading. The company’s vision is to become the AI platform of choice for leading Financial Services companies across the world.

Ravi Shankar, Co-founder & CEO of Active Intelligence said: “I am excited by the future possibilities of AI and how this technology will shape the banking and financial world. There is very strong need for banks and financial institutions to evolve fast and empower customers with the ability to do transactions as part of their habitual daily micro-conversations. With the fresh injection of funds, Active.ai will scale up and continue to hire talented people for the AI team and focus on building the best enterprise product in the market.”

Ben Mathias from Vertex Ventures said: “I am very excited to partner with the Active.ai team to redefine the paradigm of customer experience in financial services. The threat of fundamental disruption is very real in the financial services space, and companies such as Active.ai are making it easy for incumbents to not just remain relevant, but to get ahead in an ever evolving market. At Vertex, we have been strong believers in Artificial intelligence helping solve problems specific to industry verticals, and that has been a key driver of our decision to partner with Active.ai.”

Vani Kola, Managing Director at Kalaari Capital said “We are very excited to have Vertex, Creditease and Dream Incubator join us in this exciting journey of building a world class AI product from India. The fresh round of funding will help us invest even more into technology and expand our footprint into other geographies.”

“Active.Ai’s NLP platform for conversational banking is rapidly gaining acceptance with key banking customers globally. We continue to be impressed with the passion and capabilities of the team, and are excited to be part of the next phase of their journey,” said Sanat Rao, Partner, IDG Ventures India.

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).

Image Source: ShutterStock

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.

CloudCherry Raises $6M in Series A Funding from Vertex Ventures, Cisco Investments & IDG Ventures India

Customer Analytics Technologies Inc., owner of SaaS-based Customer Experience Management platform CloudCherry announced that it has raised their Series A Funding of $6M from Vertex Ventures, Cisco Investments and IDG Ventures India. This capital infusion will be used for CloudCherry’s global expansion, with a strong focus on the US, South East Asia and the Middle East. CloudCherry’s CEM platform is enjoying tremendous success in Asia already, with many leading brands using the platform to understand Customer Experience today. The product is also seeing exciting early wins in the North American markets and is set to welcome many more soon.

CloudCherry was founded by Vinod Muthukrishnan, Vijay R Lakshmanan, Prem K Viswanath and Nagendra CL, with the support of angels Prof. Sriram Subramanian (late), Dr. Bala V Balachandran and Hariharan B. CloudCherry provides an industry-leading Omni-channel, SAAS based Customer Experience Management (CEM) platform that helps brands track, measure and improve Customer Experience and Delight. Currently, CloudCherry works with brands in various sectors like BFSI, Retail, e-Commerce, Healthcare, Manufacturing and Hospitality. Some of the company’s clients include prominent brands like World of Titan, HDFC Bank, Central, Voonik, Caratlane and several others.

Vinod Muthukrishnan, Co-founder & CEO of CloudCherry said “We’re delighted to receive our Series A funding from globally recognized investors like Vertex Ventures, and a leading corporate investor like Cisco Investments who recognize the massive potential in the space of Customer Experience, and what our product offers. And of course, it’s great to have IDG Ventures India, who have played a tremendous role in getting us to where we are today. With this funding and their support, we are many steps closer to making our presence globally and becoming the name synonymous with Customer Experience!”

Ben Mathias, Managing Director and India Head of Vertex Ventures said “We believe the next generation of global SaaS companies will be built out of India. CloudCherry is one such company that has been able to leverage India’s deep technology talent to build and sell products in a global market. Vinod, Vijay, Prem and Nagendra have done a tremendous job in building a solution that is driving significant ROI for many customers across the world.”

“When IDG Ventures first met CloudCherry, we knew that the potential they had was tremendous. And in no time, they’ve really made a mark in the market, not just in India but across several countries, with a product that we’ve seen growing leaps & bounds almost every day. In this round, global expansion is the focus, and with CX becoming an everyday topic of discussion in every organization, the timing can’t be any better. Wishing the team an amazing run ahead” Said TC Meenakshi Sundaram, Founder & Managing Director of IDG Ventures India.