Mind The Gap By Freshchat podcast

#Tech #Business #Marketing #Technology #Growth #Customer Service #Freshworks #SaaS

28:24

In our second installment of the Small Business Starter Kit series - we’re tackling a topic that’s sometimes tricky, sometimes confusing, but ever-present: taxes. Hosts Austin and Jannese have an insightful conversation with entrepreneur Isabella Rosal who started 7th Sky Ventures , an exporter and distributor of craft spirits, beer, and wine. Having lived and worked in two different countries and started a company in a heavily-regulated field, Isabella is no stranger to navigating the paperwork-laden and jargon-infused maze of properly understanding taxes for a newly formed small business. Join us as she shares her story and provides valuable insight into how to tackle your business’ taxes - so they don’t tackle you. Learn more about how QuickBooks can help you grow your business: QuickBooks.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.…

Mind The Gap by Freshchat

Home de séries•Feed

Mind The Gap is brought to you by the team at Freshchat. We start conversations with experts and hustlers on growth, marketing, and customer experience to identify gaps in these domains and tips on how to close them. Visit the website at freshchat.com/mind-the-gap – Get a sneak peek into our upcoming episodes, record a question for the guest, and get featured on the show.

43 episódios

Mind The Gap by Freshchat

updated há 6 anos

Home de séries•Feed

43 episódios

#Tech #Business #Marketing #Technology #Growth #Customer Service #Freshworks #SaaS

Todos os episódios

Mind The Gap by Freshchat

1
Story of Zoom - Mind the Gap 8:03

há 6 years8:03

8:03

Before Zoom went IPO, not many people spoke about the company and not many knew of their story. Zoom which was exclusively known for its video communication product, struck the most successful public offering. Launching at 36$, currently valued at 92.53 USD as of today. Zoom is leading the IPO race against Pinterest, Uber, Slack, Fiverr and the lot. So, what is Zoom’s story? Rolling back to 1987 in China. Eric, who is currently the CEO of zoom, had a girlfriend who stayed miles away from him. Eric had to take a train to meet her and it used to take him 10 hours for this. He used to think to himself how great it would be if he had a device that let him talk to her and also in a sense be with her without traveling so far. Little did he know that those daydreams would eventually become the basis for Zoom. Anyway, fast forward 10 years from his days in China, he moved to Silicon Valley and joined Webex, a video communications company. Eric was quite happy in WebEx working on something that he was truly passionate about. This continued for a while. Then came a day when Webex got acquired by Cisco. Eric became the VP of engineering in Cisco taking care of WebEx. He felt the tool to be complex and outdated. Just clunky and difficult to use. Being the VP of Engineering, he took that opportunity to interact with customers on a regular basis and got to know that the customers never really liked the product as much. He was not happy about this. According to Eric, customer happiness was the most important goal to go behind and they were failing to do that. Eric thought that webex at that time was not solving newer problems faced by the customers and were penalizing customers who used their software. He wanted to build a software that customers would enjoy using! That would make the customers happy. He quickly moved out of Cisco and started Zoom in 2011. Mostly out of the sheer motive to bring joy to customers. As much as we love the story of how Zoom started, owing to the theme of Mind the Gap, let’s move along and look at growth, marketing and customer experience learnings from Zoom’s story. And don’t worry even though there is a LOT to learn from Zoom, we have condensed our learnings into three most important lessons to make it snackable. Let’s zoom right in. Number one. Product led growth - One thing different about Zoom is how much they chose to stick to things that worked for them without following trends and fads. When Eric first decided to launch Zoom, he had his team work on the product for two full years before getting out to the market. In a world where startups talk about launching first and failing fast, Zoom has been pretty old school in terms of doing one thing extremely well and getting it right the first time. Also, an interesting observation is that Eric decided to disrupt an already noisy industry. The video collaboration domain was filled with enterprise players like WebEx, Skype, Go to meetings etc. Zoom not only launched a product in a crowded market but did a damn good job at outperforming existing players. They were able to achieve all of this because they put their bucks on the product. Zoom launched as a product that was ready to grow. Scalability, stability and performance were things that the company focused on. Zoom was a product that did not spend a lot of money on paid advertising and let the product walk the talk. Most of their traffic is organic, through word of mouth, through their content, and through their hardware integrations. The only time they actually spent money was to set up a billboard. That too because Eric liked the attention it created when his neighbours came and told him that they spotted his company’s billboard on the way and that it was pretty cool. The second strategy might seem trivial but I feel it’s the most important takeaway - “Listening”. The two years that Eric’s team spent on creating a product, they made sure that they spoke to more and more people to understand their pain points, their preferences, and their feedback on whatever tool they were already using. Most importantly they “heard them out”. After all, this is a company that cared the most about customer happiness over anything else. Interestingly, in one of Bloomerg’s interview with Eric, when they asked him about Cisco catching up in terms of features and what Eric is planning to do in terms of dealing with competition, this is what he had to say. They don’t have any strategy against competitors. As long as they listen to customers and make them happy, they don’t have to worry about anything. The third and final strategy of Zoom’s was the same as Airbnb’s. We already made an episode on Airbnb’s story. Don’t forget to tune in to that episode after this one. Now, back to the story — Zoom’s strategy was to go behind making their existing customers happy instead of going behind new customers. Retention over acquisition — classic but brave move. For zoom, their customer support team forms the main pillar of the company. As I mentioned previously, feedback and feature suggestions are taken extremely seriously at Zoom. Their philosophy is to make the existing customers happy first. So happy that they would want to spread the love through word of mouth. A mutual setup, the more happy your customers are, the more happy you get, you know, even in terms of bottom line. Zoom’s story is quite different from every other brand story we’ve ever heard. When every other brand wants to prove itself as a misfit or a rule breaker and a challenger of the status quo, Zoom was a little different. When Eric was asked about rules, he jokingly said, oh no. We love rules and we make sure that we follow them. Slowly and truly, Zoom grew to become different in its own way by embracing what worked for them and not following trends. Not just that, there have been a lot of talks around how Zoom’s philosophy is not about growing fast but to stay as a company that meets customer needs constantly. Ironically this is what led to their fast growth. Zoom is a living proof that when you strive for customer happiness, you are never going to be disappointed at the returns. Currently, there are about half a million unique business domains, millions of individuals, spending 18 billion minutes annually on Zoom. That’s 18 billion minutes of happiness sold. Reference - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICgehQ1xd24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xqog63KOANc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H-TsqT1GUk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ja9VMe18sh8…

Mind The Gap by Freshchat

1
Last week in startups - Global - Mind the Gap News 4:15

há 6 years4:15

4:15

Ally raises $8M Series A for its OKR solution OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results, are a popular planning method in Silicon Valley. Like most of those methods that make you fill in some form once every quarter, that employees find rather annoying and a waste of their time. Ally wants to change that and make the process more useful. The company today announced that it has raised an $8 million Series A round led by Accel Partners, with participation from Vulcan Capital, Founders Co-op and Lee Fixel. The company, which launched in 2018, previously raised a $3 million seed round. Most companies that adopt this methodology, though, tend to work with spreadsheets and Google Docs. Over time, that simply doesn’t work, especially as companies get larger. Ally, then, is meant to replace these other tools. The service is currently in use at “hundreds” of companies in more than 70 countries, Vellore tells me. Simon Data hauls in $30M Series C to continue building customer data platform As businesses use an increasing variety of marketing software solutions, the goal around collecting all of that data is to improve customer experience. Simon Data announced a $30 million Series C round today to help. The round was led by Polaris Partners . Previous investors .406 Ventures and F-Prime Capital also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $59 million, according to the company. Companies tend to use a variety of marketing tools, and Simon Data takes on the job of understanding the data and activities going on in each one. Then based on certain actions — such as, say, an abandoned shopping cart — it delivers a consistent message to the customer, regardless of the source of the data that triggered the action. They see this ability to pull together data as a customer data platform (CDP). In fact, part of its job is to aggregate data and use it as the basis of other activities. In this case, it involves activating actions you define based on what you know about the customer at any given moment in the process. RedDoorz raises $70M to expand its budget hotel network in Southeast Asia Singapore-based budget-hotel booking startup RedDoorz is tiny in comparison to fast-growing giant Oyo. But it is holding its ground and winning the trust of an ever-growing number of investors. The four-year-old startup announced it has raised $70 million in a Series C financing round, less than five months after it closed its $45 million Series B. The new round, which is ongoing, was led by Asia Partners and saw participation from new investors Rakuten Capital and Mirae Asset-Naver Asia Growth FundRegardless, the new funds will help RedDoorz fight SoftBank-backed Oyo, which is already aggressively expanding to new markets. Oyo currently operates in more than 80 nations. The startup operates in 80 cities across Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines and Vietnam, and plans to use the new capital to expand its network in its existing markets, said Saberwal. At least for the next year, RedDoorz has no plans to expand beyond the four markets where it currently operates, he said. Twitter leads $100M round in top Indian regional social media platform ShareChat ShareChat, a four-year-old social network in India that serves tens of million of people in regional languages, just answered that question with a $100 million financing round led by global giant Twitter . Other than Twitter, TrustBridge Partners, and existing investors Shunwei Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAIF Capital, India Quotient and Morningside Venture Capital also participated in the Series D round of ShareChat. The new round, which pushes ShareChat’s all-time raise to $224 million, valued the firm at about $650 million, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. ShareChat declined to comment on the valuation. This investment will help ShareChat grow and provide the company’s management team access to Twitter’s executives as thought partners Moving on to acquisitions: Salesforce is acquiring ClickSoftware for $1.35B Just days after closing the hefty $15.7 billion Tableau deal, salesforce opened its wallet again, this time announcing it has bought field service software company ClickSoftware for a tidy $1.35 billion. This one could help beef up the company’s field service offering, which falls under the Service Cloud umbrella. In its June earnings report, the company reported that Service Cloud crossed the $1 billion revenue threshold for the first time. This acquisition is designed to keep those numbers growing. What else caught our eyes- Developers accuse Apple of anti-competitive behavior with its privacy changes in iOS 13 A group of app developers have penned a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, arguing that certain privacy-focused changes to Apple’s iOS 13 operating system will hurt their business. In a report by The Information, the developers were said to have accused Apple of anti-competitive behavior when it comes to how apps can access user location data. With iOS 13, Apple aims to curtail apps’ abuse of its location-tracking features as part of its larger privacy focus as a company. Today, many apps ask users upon first launch to give their app the “Always Allow” location-tracking permission. Users can confirm this with a tap, unwittingly giving apps far more access to their location data than is actually necessary, in many cases. There will now be a new option upon launch presented to users, “Allow Once,” which allows users to first explore the app to see if it fits their needs before granting the app developer the ability to continually access location data. This option will be presented alongside existing options “Allow While Using App” and “Don’t Allow.” The app developers argue that this change may confuse less-technical users, who will assume the app isn’t functioning properly unless they figure out how to change their iOS Settings to ensure the app has the proper permissions.…

Mind The Gap by Freshchat

1
Last week in startups - India - Mind the Gap News 4:36

há 6 years4:36

4:36

One of the biggest funding this week was raised by online reseller network Meesho, gaining $125 Mn in a round led by Naspers, with participation from Facebook and existing investors SAIF, Sequoia, Shunwei Capital, RPS and Venture Highway. This fund raise will help it to make deeper inroads in areas outside India’s major metro regions, by creating more entrepreneurs, and as a result, reaching remote customers not serviced by traditional e-commerce marketplaces. Also, rumours are rife that the Japanese conglomerate is reportedly looking to invest $200 Mn in the company as well. Another major round was raised by ShareChat, adding $100 Mn in its latest Series D round of funding. Twitter and TrustBridge Partners are two new investors joining this latest funding round, while existing investors participating in this round include Shunwei Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAIF Capital, India Quotient and Morningside Venture Capital. The round took the total funding raised by ShareChat to $224 Mn. Bengaluru-based AI startup Parentof raised $1 Mnin a seed funding round led by V Srinivas and other existing investors. Parentof is a decision sciences organization which provides insights into child growth and decision analytics. With this, total funding raised by Parentof is $2 Mn. The funds will be used towards further evolving their technology, as well as expanding their partner network. Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending startup Faircent raised a fresh round of funding from Das Capital and Gunosy Capital. Existing investors Starharbor Asia and M&S Partners have also participated in the round. The startup will use the funding to strengthen its technology backend, expansion of its product offerings and reach. Chennai-based conversational AI startup Uniphore Software Systems raised $51 Mn in its Series C funding round led by March Capital Partners. Chiratae Ventures (formerly IDG Ventures), Sistema Asia, CXO Fund, ITP, Iron Pillar, Patni Family also participated in the round. The funds will be used to accelerate its go-to-market in North America, invest in research and development for the next wave of innovation on its platform and grow its talented employee base globally. Robotics startup Emotix, popularly known as Miko, which develops educational and recreational robot toys for children, announced to raise an INR 53.42 Cr ($7.5 Mn) Series A led by Chiratae Ventures. YourNest Venture Capital, investor Bruno Raschle and a group of angel investors are also participating in Emotix’s latest round. The company said it would be using the funding to expand internationally to North America, UK and the Middle East. A portion of the funds would be allocated for developing new products and R&D in the areas of emotional and artificial intelligence, which form a crucial component of the Miko emotive robot toy. Easy Home Finance: Real estate and lending tech company Easy Home Finance Limited announced a strategic partnership with Harbourfront Capital, a group company of Das Capital. The VC firm will invest an undisclosed amount in the real estate financing company. Easy will be utilising the funds from Harbourfront in expanding its assets under management (AUM) base and for further investment in its technology platform. Gurugram-based credit card bill payment startup Cred raised a bridge Series B round of INR 27.55 Cr ($4 Mn) from Sequoia Capital India. The company issued 20,179 Series B CCCPS shares priced Rs 13,653.31 each. The company said in its filings that the Bridge Series B funds will be used for growth, expansion, marketing and general corporate activities of the company. Moving on to acquisitions: Bengaluru-headquartered coworking space provider CoWrks acquired The UnCube for an undisclosed amount. The Gurugram-headquartered UnCube provides on-demand workspace solutions. Post-acquisition, CoWrks will rename the combined entity to CoWrks Go. CoWrks is now expanding its network of productive spaces by bringing on board a chain of cafes, restaurants, hotels, business lounges, etc. Ola acquihired Pikup.ai, a Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence startup. The deal value remains undisclosed, however, Pikup.ai founders — Inder Singh and Ritwik Saikia — along with its team will join Ola. With the acquihire, Ola aims to advance the application of machine learning and AI to identify deep insights that can lead to improved mobility outcomes. What else caught our eyes? Mukesh Ambani announced free Jio connectivity and Jio-Azure cloud services for tech startups in India by 2021. Startups will have to register on the Jio portal to access these services, which are expected to be available from January 2021. To provide these cloud services, Reliance Jio has announced a partnership with the tech giant Microsoft and its Azure cloud vertical.…

Mind The Gap by Freshchat

1
Last week in startups - Global - Mind the Gap News 5:37

há 6 years5:37

5:37

This episode we have a couple of interesting bits to talk about. Starting with a company that offers a safety net to digital nomads, the world’s largest internet restaurant company and most interesting of all, keep listening to know if SpaceX is turning into Uber for space? Stay tuned to know more. So, last week’s startup funding scene. We had a total of 283 funding rounds, $6.6 billion total funding, 175 acquisitions recorded, and a transaction of a total acquisition amount of $11.2 billion. Let’s dive right into the highlights now. SafetyWing raises $3.5M seed to offer medical insurance to ‘digital nomads’ They’ve got quite an interesting pitch. They claim to build safety nets for digital nomads. People used to be limited to working locally. Now the internet and recent technologies have made it possible to hire and work for companies globally, allowing people to live wherever in the world they choose to, free from the physical restraints of an office location. “Unfortunately, social safety nets like health insurance are national and only available in one’s home country. Millions are left to figure this out on their own with the majority going uninsured. To solve this problem, we are building the first global social safety net: a welfare state on the internet.” SafetyWing’s first product is focused on medical travel insurance, with the promise to provide medical cover for anybody who works outside their home country. The cover is flexible, too, sold as a 28-day rolling subscription that can be paused at any time. Cover starts at $37 every 4 weeks. Meanwhile, to support its mission of providing a safety net for digital nomads and to develop further products, the 2017-founded company, whose other co-founders are Sarah Sandnes (CTO) and Hans Kjellby (COO), has raised $3.5 million in seed funding. Leading the round is Nordic and Baltic-focused VC byFounders, with participation from Credit Ease Fintech Fund and DG Incubation. SafetyWing’s previous backers include YC and The Nordic Web Ventures. The ‘world’s largest internet restaurant company’ quietly raised $125 million this month Rebel Foods formerly known as Faasos, a once-small Pune, India-based company that now prepares a variety of foods in its cloud kitchens. The growth of the nine-year-old company is a bit breathtaking — and instructive. According to Bloomberg, Rebel — which this month raised $125 million in fresh capital from the Indonesian delivery service Go-Jek, Coatue Management and Goldman Sachs — now operates 235 kitchens across 20 Indian cities. And it’s processing two million orders a month. (It calls itself the “world’s largest internet restaurant company.”) While it began life as a chain of kebab restaurants, that original concept, Faasos, is now just one of eight other brands that Rebel operates, including a tea brand called Kettle & Kegs; a Chinese concept called Mandarin Oak; a pizza brand called Oven Story; and a brand called Behrouz, through which Rebel makes and sells slow-cooked biryani rice dishes. Still, it’s little wonder that Rebel is racing headlong into new markets as fast as it can. According to Bloomberg, the company is currently planning to build 100 cloud kitchens in Indonesia over the next 18 months, with Go-Jek’s help. It also expects to open 20 cloud kitchen facilities in the United Arab Emirates by December. Babylon Health confirms $550M raise at $2B+ valuation to expand its AI-based health services Babylon Health, the U.K.-based startup that has developed a number of AI-based health services, including a chatbot used by the U.K’.s National Health Service to help diagnose ailments, has confirmed a massive investment that it plans to use to expand its business to the U.S. and Asia, and expand its R&D to diagnose more serious, chronic conditions. It has closed a $550 million round of funding, valuing Babylon Health at more than $2 billion. The round brings together a number of strategic and financial investors, including PIF (Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund); a large U.S.-based health insurance company (which reports suggest to be Centene Corporation, although Babylon is not disclosing the name); Munich Re’s ERGO Fund; and returning investors Kinnevik and Vostok New Ventures. (Previous investors who do not appear to be in this round also include Demis Hassabis, the AI expert who co-founded DeepMind, which is now a part of Google.) That additionally gives Babylon (and others in digital health) a big opportunity to break down some of the more persistent problems in healthcare, such as providing services in developing economies and remote regions: one of its big efforts alongside rollouts in mature markets like the U.K. and Canada has been a service in Rwanda to bring health services to digital platforms for the first time. Trueface raises $3.7M to recognise that gun, as it’s being pulled, in real time Trueface is a U.S.-based computer vision company that turns camera data into so-called “actionable data” using machine learning and AI by employing partners who can perform facial recognition, threat detection, age and ethnicity detection, license plate recognition, emotion analysis and object detection. That means, for instance, recognising a gun, as it’s pulled in a dime store. Yes folks, welcome to your brave new world. The company has now raised $3.7 million from Lavrock Ventures, Scout Ventures and Advantage Ventures to scale the team growing partnerships and market share. Trueface claims it can identify enterprises’ employees for access to a building, detect a weapon as it’s being wielded or stop fraudulent spoofing attempts. Quite some claims. The company announced today that is has received signed agreements from D1 Capital Partners, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Light Street Capital, Sequoia Capital and Silver Lake Partners to fund a $525 million tender offer that will allow Unity’s common shareholders — the majority of which are early or current employees — to sell their shares in the company. What else caught our eyes- SpaceX is expanding its launch offerings with a new, more affordable and consistent option for small satellite operators looking to put lighter payloads into orbit. The new service offering is designed to work for customers who can take advantage of a “rideshare” launch, sharing space on a Falcon 9 with other small satellites being sent up. The rideshare option will be offered on a regular, defined schedule, and SpaceX says that it’s designed for flexibility, offering customers the ability to pre-book a spot, and ensuring that if they’re ready to launch when their rideshare comes up, the rocket will indeed go up — with or without other payloads also booked that may not be ready in time. SpaceX’s new service is designed somewhat like rideshare programs here on Earth: Passengers who are ready get to ride, and the company looks to fill seats by offering bookings both in advance (12 or more months out) and much closer to launch time (between 12 and 6 months out) with a possibility of even tighter turnaround, though SpaceX hasn’t publicly posted pricing for that option, which means it’ll probably be costly. As for those with plenty of notice, they get the biggest price break: Launches start at just $2.25 million for payloads of up to 150 kg (330 lbs), or $4.5 million for those weighing up to 300 kg (660 lbs). That sounds like a lot, but consider that the lowest cost for a current SpaceX launch is currently somewhere around $57 million.…

Mind The Gap by Freshchat

1
Last week in startups - India - Mind the Gap News 5:07

há 6 years5:07

5:07

This week US-based ecommerce company eBay is investing $160 Mn in Indian ecommerce company, Paytm Mall, valued at $2.86 Bn post-investment. According to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs filings accessed by Inc42, Paytm E-commerce private limited is issuing 1,28,028 equity shares at a price of $1,249.73 per share to eBay Singapore Service Pvt Ltd. Further, Bengaluru-based digital payments company PhonePe received INR 697.9 Cr ($101.5 Mn) equity infusion from its Singapore-based parent, PhonePe Private Limited Singapore. Interestingly, the investment has come after PhonePe founders— Rahul Chari Vardha and Sameer Nigam— increased their equity stake in the company. In April, Vardha picked up 1.67 Mn equity shares and Nigam picked up 6.63 Mn shares at a nominal value of INR 1. Gurugram-based home services marketplaceUrbanClap raised a $75 Mn Series E funding round led by Tiger Global. Existing investors Steadview Capital and Vy Capital also participated in this round. Prior to this, UrbanClap raised INR 149 Lakh ($216K) in fresh fundingfrom ex-Flipkart CTO Mekin Maheshwari and Avaana Capital founder Anjali Bansal. This transaction is said to be split into two parts, a primary round which resulted in a share subscription by the investors and a secondary share sale by some early institutional investors. Veri5Digital: Bengaluru-based software services provider Veri5Digital raised $2 Mn in Series A funding led by California-based Khosla Ventures. Veri5Digital plans to use the funding to scale its identity solutions for the Indian market and also build new identity and Digital India related products and services. It is also close to launching its identity related products in the US and Asia markets. Indifi: Gurugram-based B2B lender Indifi Technologies raised INR 145 Cr ($21 Mn) in its Series C funding round, led by the CDC Group. The company also has additional investors like Accel India, Omidyar Network, Fair Finance Fund and Elevar Equity. The company aims to utilise the funds to modernise and expand the existing business into new areas of business, develop infrastructure, capital expenditure, repay debts and general corporate expenditure to meet objectives. Pocket Aces: Digital entertainment company, Pocket Aces raised an INR 100 Cr ( $14.34 Mn) funding round from Sequoia India, DSP Group, and 3one4 Capital. Pocket Aces will utilise the funding to expand its content library and technology platform, and to acquire more talent. Further, it will also continue to invest into its live gaming platform Loco with an aim to hit 50 Mn users in the next two years. Easy Home Finance: Real estate and lending tech company Easy Home Finance Limited announced a strategic partnership with Harbourfront Capital, a group company of Das Capital. The VC firm will invest an undisclosed amount in the real estate financing company. Easy will be utilising the funds from Harbourfront in expanding its assets under management (AUM) base and for further investment in its technology platform. Gurugram-based credit card bill payment startup Cred raised a bridge Series B round of INR 27.55 Cr ($4 Mn) from Sequoia Capital India. The company issued 20,179 Series B CCCPS shares priced Rs 13,653.31 each. The company said in its filings that the Bridge Series B funds will be used for growth, expansion, marketing and general corporate activities of the company. Moving on to acquisitions: Robotic process automation company, Automation Anywhere, announced theacquisition of Paris-based Klevops for an undisclosed amount. Post-acquisition, Automation Anywhere fast forwards the RPA category to Attended Automation 2.0, where managers can easily orchestrate workflows across a team of employees and bots. This enables customers to automate more processes with the same level of central governance, security and analytic capability. What else caught our eyes? Bengaluru-based food delivery unicorn Swiggy which is definitely turning into a generic trademark these days, you know a verb for ordering food online. Is reportedly close to raising a $700-$750 Mn funding round led by its existing investor Naspers. Naspers will be investing around $350 Mn along with a group of Korean investors such as STIC Investments and Korean Omega Investment who are said to co-invest about $50 Mn. While, the rest is said to be raised from the other existing investors of Swiggy.…

Mind The Gap by Freshchat

1
Last week in startups - India - Mind the Gap News 5:08

há 6 years5:08

5:08

In total, this week, 20 startups raised $75.89 Mn funding and one startup acquisition took place. In a major announcement this week, Japanese conglomerate SoftBank launched its second technology-focussed investment corpus, SoftBank Vision Fund II, with an outlay of $108 Bn. The fund claimed to have received commitments from technology majors such as Apple and Microsoft. Other investors in the fund include National Investment Corporation of National Bank of Kazakhstan, Standard Chartered Bank, and some undisclosed investors from Taiwan. Further, SoftBank will be investing $38 Bn in the fund along with other committed investors including Foxconn, MUFG, SMFG and Mizuho. The objective of the fund is to facilitate the continued acceleration of the AI revolution through investment in market-leading, and tech-enabled growth companies. Bengaluru-based gaming company Playshifu raised $7 Mn in Series A funding. The round was led by Chiratae (formerly IDG Ventures India), Inventus Capital and Bharat Innovation Fund (BIF). Existing investor IDFC-Parampara Fund also participated. The company plans to use the funds to invest further towards tech innovation, research on unique phygital interactions and new product developments. Mumbai-based online insurance brokerage platform Coverfox received a INR 40 Cr ($5.89 Mn) capital infusion from its existing investors. According to Ministry of Corporate Affairs, Coverfox issued Series C5 compulsorily convertible preference shares (CCPS) to investors such as International Finance Corporation, Aegon Digital Investments, Transamerica Ventures, Accel India and SAIF Partners. Bengaluru-based online classifieds marketplace Quikr raised INR 20 Cr ($2.9 Mn) in debt funding. According to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs filings, the company has raised debt by issuing 200 compulsorily convertible debentures to Trifecta Capital in May. The company had received INR 13.9 Cr in a capital infusion from its Mauritius-based entity in May. Mumbai-based SME lending startup Drip Capital raised $25 Mn in a Series B funding round led by Accel Partners with participation from existing investors Sequoia India, Wing VC, and Y Combinator. New investors in this round include GC1 Ventures and institutional investor platform Trusted Insight. The funds will be used to expand its global footprint, launching in the United Arab Emirates and Mexico in 2019. Mumbai-based robotics startup emotix raised $2.69 Mn (INR 18.58 Cr) in a fresh funding round from Chiratae Ventures (formerly IDG Ventures), Technology Venture Fund and Yournest India. Sources close to the development indicated to Inc42 that the investment is a part of a larger funding round. The fresh funds will be invested towards company’s research and development requirements. Delhi-based vernacular real-money gaming platform WinZO Games raised $5 Mn in Series A funding. The round was led by Kalaari Capital and messaging and payments platform Hike. The company claims to have more than 7 Mn registered users across Tier 2/3/4/5 cities. It claims that users are currently spending more than 55 minutes inside the app on average every day. Moving on to acquisitions: Mumbai-based conversational AI platform Haptik acqui-hired Los Angeles-based AI startup Convrg. Additionally, the company has hired Timothy Carey, a technology industry veteran with over 20 years of experience across AI and enterprise software, to serve as its General Manager for the region. Convrg’s founding team— — will report to Carey and will help drive Haptik’s business in the US respectively serving as VP of Strategic Partnerships, VP of Growth, and VP of Technology Solutions. What else caught our eyes? Apple has paid $1 Bn to acquire Intel’s smartphone modem chips business, which was one weak area in the electronic giant’s plans to release next-gen iPhones ready for 5G networks. As part of the acquisition, 2,200 Intel employees will be joining Apple by the end of the year and Intel will also sign over close to 17K patents to the Cupertino company. American private equity firm Blackstone has reportedly invested $250 Mn in Kishore Biyani’s Future Group which owns supermarket chains such as Bigbazaar, Brand Factory, EasyDay and more. The investment is said to be a mix of equity and structured debt, and be used for the capital expansion of Biyani’s discounted fashion retail chain Brand Factory.…

Mind The Gap by Freshchat

1
Last week in startups - Global - Mind the Gap News 6:32

há 6 years6:32

6:32

We had a total of 316 funding rounds, $8.4 billion total funding, 93 acquisitions recorded, and a transaction of a total acquisition amount of $63.9 billion. Let’s dive right into the highlights now. Standard Cognition lands $35M at $535M valuation to battle Amazon Go EQT Ventures, Initialized Capital, CRV and Y Combinator have fueled Standard Cognition with another $35 million to help retailers battle Amazon. The deal values the San Francisco-based autonomous checkout startup, founded in 2017, at $535 million. Standard Cognition implants its AI-powered computer vision platform, which enables the autonomous checkout process, in brick-and-mortar stores. To date, the company has installed its hardware in five stores in the U.S. and Japan, with plans to expand globally using the new investment. Standard Cognition announces its Series B financing just eight months after closing a $40 million Series A. Suswal, justifying the lightning-fast growth, said 2019 has been Standard’s “year of deployment,” next year will be “the year of repeatability” and 2021 will be “the year of scale.” The company has raised a total of $86 million in venture capital funding. Muzmatch adds $7M to swipe right on Muslim-majority markets Muzmatch, a matchmaking app for Muslims, has just swiped a $7 million Series A on the back of continued momentum for its community-sensitive approach to soulmate searching for people of the Islamic faith. It now has more than 1.5 million users of its apps, across 210 countries, swiping, matching and chatting online as they try to find “the one.” Unity, now valued at $6B, raising up to $525M Unity’s private valuation is climbing, but it’s growing unclear whether the company’s leadership is planning to take the 15-year-old gaming powerhouse public anytime soon. The company announced today that is has received signed agreements from D1 Capital Partners, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Light Street Capital, Sequoia Capital and Silver Lake Partners to fund a $525 million tender offer that will allow Unity’s common shareholders — the majority of which are early or current employees — to sell their shares in the company. The company also confirmed that it wrapped up a $150 million Series E funding round in May that doubled the company’s valuation to $6 billion. The announcement confirms the valuation we reported in May, though at a higher amount of capital raised. Fintech decacorn Nubank raises $400M led by TCV What’s a decocorn? Well I had to google this as well - It is a word used for those companies valued over $10 billion. Hectocorn is for companies valued over $100 billion. Brazil-based Nubank, which offers a suite of banking and financial services for Brazilian consumers, announced today that it has raised a $400 million Series F round of venture capital led by Woody Marshall of TCV. The growth-stage fund is best known for its investment in Netflix but has also made fintech a high priority, with over $1.5 billion in investments in the space. According to Nubank, the company has now raised $820 million across seven venture rounds. Leveraging unique technology, David Vélez and his team are continuously pushing the boundaries of delivering best in class financial services, grounded in a culture of tech and innovation. Nubank has all the core tenets of what TCV looks for in preeminent franchise investments. Airbud raises $4 million to add a voice interface to your website Amazon’s Alexa ushered in a new dawn of user interfaces, bringing voice into the mix as a viable option. Dozens of companies have sprouted because of this, not least of which being Airbud.io. Airbud allows any company to add a voice interface to its website. The company just closed a $4 million round led by Hanaco Ventures, with participation from ERA and Spider Capital. By allowing companies to add voice/chat bot utility to their websites, Airbud hopes to increase retention of end-users on sites and give them easier access to the information they seek. Krush says that Airbud is focusing on websites that you have to be on, rather than the ones you want to be on. That means Airbud clients are mostly in the healthcare space and travel space, helping end-users find a physician or book a flight using their voice. Moving on to mergers and acquisitions - Apple has announced the acquisition of chip-maker Intel's smartphone modem business for $1 billion. Approximately 2,200 Intel employees will join Apple, along with intellectual property, equipment and leases, the Cupertino-based iPhone maker said in a statement late Thursday. "This agreement enables us to focus on developing technology for the 5G network while retaining critical intellectual property and modem technology that our team has created," said Intel CEO Bob Swan. "We're looking forward to putting our full effort into 5G where it most closely aligns with the needs of our global customer base, including network operators, telecommunications equipment manufacturers and cloud service providers," he added. Apple will hold over 17,000 wireless technology patents, ranging from protocols for cellular standards to modem architecture and modem operation. What else caught our eyes- Dark has been keeping its startup in the dark for the last couple of years while it has built a unique kind of platform it calls “deployless” software development. If you build your application in Dark’s language inside of Dark’s editor, the reward is you can deploy it automatically on Dark’s infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform without worrying about all of the typical underlying deployment tasks. The company emerged from stealth today and announced $3.5 million in seed funding, which it actually received back in 2017. The founders have spent the last couple of years building this rather complex platform. In Dark, you’re getting the benefit of your editor knowing how the language works. So you get really great autocomplete, and your infrastructure is set up for you as soon as you’ve written any code because we know exactly what is required Source - Techcrunch, Crunchbase…

Mind The Gap by Freshchat

1
Last week in startups - India - Mind the Gap News 5:10

há 6 years5:10

5:10

In total, this week, 11 startups raised $136.5Mn funding and three startup acquisitions took place. One of the biggest funding rounds in the Indian startup ecosystem was Seattle and Pune-based software company Icertis. It raised $115 Mn in a funding round led by US-based venture capital firm Greycroft and PremjiInvest. With this round, the company has achieved a valuation above $1 Bn and joins the ranks of SaaS unicorns such as Freshworks and Druva. The company said it will utilise the capital to strengthen its product, invest in new technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence, and machine learning and expand its global footprint. Gurugram-based online grocery delivery startup Grofers received an infusion of $14.2 Mn from its Singapore-based entity, Grofers International. With this investment, Grofers International has been allotted 812 equity shares in the grocery delivery startup. The company has also raised an additional $10 Mn in its ongoing Series F round. This investment has come from an Abu Dhabi-based entity Capital Investment LLC. Noida-based ecommerce platform Paytm Mall raised an undisclosed amount from US-based ecommercecompany eBay. In a strategic partnership, eBay picked up a 5.5% stake in the Indian ecommerce marketplace. Through this partnership, eBay inventory will be made accessible to the active customer base of Paytm Mall, a subsidiary of the Indian fintech unicorn Paytm. It would also enable eBay sellers to reach new customers in the rapidly growing Indian market. Bengaluru-based online premium tea brand Teabox raised an undisclosed amount of funding. Teabox founder Kausshal Dugarr told Inc42 that Dubai-based NB Ventures, the family office of Neelesh Bhatnagar has invested in the round. The company’s existing investors such as Accel partners also participated in the round. Electronics maker, boAt received a commitment of $2.9 Mn in venture debt from BAC Acquisitions, which was cofounded by the Flipkart founder Sachin Bansal. boAt claims to have acquired over 1.2 Mn consumers, and is currently selling over 8K units per day at an average of 5 units per minute. New Delhi-based all-in-one procurement platform Procol raised a seed round of $1Mn from Blume Ventures and Rainmatter Capital (Zerodha). The funding will help Procol scale their procurement platform and start deploying other applications around it. Procol helps food retail and FMCG companies reduce their procurement and related supply chain costs. Moving on to acquisitions: Mumbai-based data analytics firm Ugam has been acquired by the US-based data-driven marketing agency Merkle, which is owned by the digital marketing multinational Dentsu Aegis Network. Post acquisition, Ugam will become a Merkle company and the company’s cofounder and CEO Sunil Mirani will report to Merkle’s America head. Further, reporting structures for the rest of the management team of Ugam will remain unchanged. US-based software company Ebix and Gurugram-based travel and ticket booking platform, Yatra Online have signed a definitive agreement for a merger. For the merger, each ordinary share of Yatra will be entitled to receive 0.005 shares of a new class of preferred stock of Ebix. Following the completion of the transaction, Yatra will become part of Ebix’s EbixCash travel portfolio alongside Via and Mercury and will continue to serve customers under the Yatra brand. What else caught our eyes? Ola Electric becomes India’s newest unicorn with new $250 million investment from SoftBank India’s Ola is further widening its lead over Uber in the nation — and getting the help it needs from their mutual investor. Ola Electric has raised $250 million from SoftBank as India’s largest ride hailing firm pushes to scale its electric vehicles business in the country. The infusion comes as New Delhi looks to take a serious step in electrifying the existing fleet of cabs and scooters in the country as it attempts to curtail air pollution and carbon emissions. The country has set an ambitious goal to convert 40% of the fleet to electric by 2026.…

Mind The Gap by Freshchat

1
Last week in startups - Global - Mind the Gap News 4:48

há 6 years4:48

4:48

So, last week’s startup funding scene. We had a total of 385 funding rounds, $17 billion total funding, 145 acquisitions recorded, and a transaction of a total acquisition amount of $17.1 billion. Let’s dive right into the highlights now. Swit, a collaboration suite that offers ‘freedom from integrations,’ raises $6 million in seed funding The app combines messaging with a roster of productivity tools, like task management, calendars and Gantt charts, to give teams “freedom from integrations.” Originally founded in Seoul and now based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Swit announced that it has raised a $6 million seed round led by Korea Investment Partners, with participation from Hyundai Venture Investment Corporation and Mirae Asset Venture Investment. Even though the market is heavily saturated with great unicorns, many companies need multiple collaboration apps and there is nothing that seamlessly combines them, so users don’t have to go back and forth between multiple platforms. Many employees rely on Slack or Microsoft Teams to chat with one another, on top of several project management apps, like Asana, Jira, Monday and Confluence, and email to communicate with people at other companies. Most businesses use at least two messaging apps and four to seven collaboration tools. Swit’s goal is to cover all those needs in one app. It comes with integrated Kanban task management, calendars and Gantt charts, and at the end of this year about 20 to 30 bots and apps will be available in its marketplace. GetAccept’s workflow and e-signature platform for sales secures $7M Series A funding Many years ago every sales deal was sealed with a handshake between two people. Today, digitization has moved into the sales process, but it hasn’t necessarily improved the experience. In fact, it’s often become a more time-consuming affair because information and communications are scattered across multiple channels and the number of people involved in a deal has increased. That means lots of offers and quotes get lost in the mix. GetAccept is a startup that provides an all-in-one sales platform where video, live chat, proposal design, document tracking and e-signatures come together to simplify the life of a sales team. The new capital will be used to scale sales and marketing, and accelerate product innovation for GetAccept’s industry-leading document workflow solution for sales. Kencko chugs down $3.4M to help you get more fruit and vegetables in your diet Kencko, a company that wants to help people eat more fruit and vegetables in their daily life, is entering feast mode after it announced a $3.4 million seed round for growth and product development. Kencko develops plant-based products that help people eat healthily without having to suffer the pain of horrible-tasting food or other extreme eating. That’s to say that its fruit drinks, the company’s first product, include the pulp and vitamins absent in pressed juice but come in a convenient sachet that has been flash-frozen and slow-dried to retain all the goodness. Beyond products, Kencko is also using the new capital to develop its direct-to-consumer strategy. A big focus is on its mobile app, which is currently in beta with early customers but will get a full launch this year. Moving on to mergers and acquisitions - Laundrapp and Zipjet merge to form largest on-demand laundry service in UK, seal new funding Two of Europe’s biggest on-demand laundry startups are merging today. Laundrapp from London and Zipjet from Berlin are confirming the completion of a previously-rumored merger through which the combined business will become the largest on-demand laundry business in the UK. What else caught our eyes- Google’s SMILY is reverse image search for cancer diagnosis Spotting and diagnosing cancer is a complex and difficult process even for the dedicated medical professionals who do it for a living. A new tool from Google researchers could improve the process by providing what amounts to reverse image search for suspicious or known cancerous cells. But it’s more than a simple matching algorithm. Part of the diagnosis process is often examining tissue samples under a microscope and looking for certain telltale signals or shapes that may indicate one or another form of cancer. This can be a long and arduous process because every cancer and every body is different, and the person inspecting the data must not only look at the patient’s cells but also compare them to known cancerous tissues from a database or even a printed book of samples. In a study of pathologists given the tool to use, the results were promising. The doctors appeared to adopt the tool quickly, not only using its official capabilities but doing things like reshaping the query box to test the results or see if their intuition on a feature being common or troubling was right. “The tools were preferred over a traditional interface, without a loss in diagnostic accuracy,”…

Mind The Gap by Freshchat

1
Story of Disney - Mind the Gap Brand Stories 8:38

há 6 years8:38

8:38

Change is the only thing that’s constant. We all know that. Managing change is the biggest challenge that most of the growing companies face. Change is what makes most companies fail. So imagine the strength it takes for a company to not just manage change but also endure it and win over it. That’s Disney for you. Disney was founded in the year 1923 by Walt Disney. It initially started as an animation studio called Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio. They started with silent Alice Comedies short films featuring a live-action child actress in an animated world. They slowly started creating short animated films, then moved on to rebrand themselves as the Walt Disney studios in 1929. That’s a story that all of us know. In today’s episode we are going to focus on Disney’s growth and marketing strategies that helped them not just reach the top place but also sustain it for so long. Also, we’ll be talking a little bit about how they make their customers happy! As we like to call it - 96 years of disney in 9.6 minutes.…

Mind The Gap by Freshchat

1
Last week in startups - Global - Mind the Gap 6:15

há 6 years6:15

6:15

So, let’s start with last week’s startup funding scene. We had a total of 391 funding rounds, $9.2 billion total funding, 146 acquisitions recorded, and a transaction of a total acquisition amount of $12.5 billion. Let’s dive right into the highlights now. Used car marketplace Motorway picks up £11M Series A Motorway, the U.K. used car marketplace, has raised £11 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is Marchmont Ventures, the fund managed by Hugo Burge and Alan Martin (the former CEO and CFO of Momondo Group, respectively), along with participation from existing backer LocalGlobe. Founded by the team behind Top10 — the mobile and broadband comparison site that exited to uSwitch in 2011 — Motorway has set out to make it easier to sell your used car online. The website lets car sellers instantly see live offers from multiple car buying services and specialist dealerships. Indonesia’s EV Hive raises $13.5M and expands into co-living and new retail WeWork’s battle to win co-working in Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country, is intensifying after one of the U.S. firm’s key rivals issued a slew of announcements to double down on its business. EV Hive, an Indonesia-based co-working startup, said today that it has raised $13.5 million and expanded into new verticals. The company is putting off plans to foray into new countries in order to prioritize growth opportunities at home. The four-year-old company, which started as a project for seed-stage VC firm East Ventures, has rebranded to CoHive as part of the strategy to diversify its business. That’ll see it add new services for living spaces (CoLiving) and retailers (CoRetail), in addition to its core co-working and events businesses. Duffel raises $21.5M in Series A from Benchmark for its travel platform Ten months ago London startup Duffel hinted that it would be “a new way to book travel online, aiming at the booking experience ‘end to end,’ ” and announced a healthy $4.7 million funding round, but not much else. Last week, Duffel announced a funding of $21.5 million in Series A from U.S. VC giant Benchmark, which also backed Snap, Twitter and Uber. Benchmark is joined by Blossom Capital and Index Ventures, which participated in Duffel’s $4.7 million seed round last year. Duffel appears to be building a new software stack for travel, in the same way that challenger banks started from scratch to make themselves more agile than the laggard banks. SafeAI raises $5M to develop and deploy autonomy for mining and construction vehicles Startup SafeAI, powered by a founding talent team with experience across Apple, Ford and Caterpillar, is emerging from stealth today with a $5 million funding announcement. The company’s focus is on autonomous vehicle technology, designed and built specifically for heavy equipment used in the mining and construction industries. What SafeAI hopes to add is an underlying architecture that acts as a fully autonomous (Level 4 by SAE standards, so no human driver) platform for a variety of equipment. Said platform is designed with openness, modularity and upgradeability in mind to help ensure that its clients can take advantage of new advances in autonomy and AI as they become available. Two Sigma leads $12m series A for expert knowledge network NewtonX NewtonX is a “knowledge access platform” which attempts to intelligently answer questions posed to it by business clients. Clients answer a carefully calibrated series of questions to properly vet and scope a query, and then NewtonX farms it out to it network of experts for insight. That rapid-response network has now gotten the attention of Two Sigma Ventures, the venture wing of the high-flying algorithmic-trading hedge fund, which led a $12 million Series A round into New York City-based NewtonX. That’s a follow up to a $3 million seed round co-led by Third Prime Capital and Xfund last year. Moving on to acquisitions - WordPress management site WP Engine acquires Flywheel as it moves to a $1B valuation and IPO WordPress now accounts for 34 percent of all websites globally, and today one of the key companies that helps handle the creation and management of some of those WP-hosted sites is getting a little bigger through some consolidation in the wider ecosystem. WP Engine, which works with businesses to build and manage their WordPress-hosted sites, has aquired Flywheel, a smaller competitor. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, WP Engine, as Brunner describes it, focuses largely on mid-market and larger businesses, while Flywheel — founded and currently based out of Omaha — has focused on smaller businesses. That makes the two natural complements to each other, but Brunner notes that there will be more gained from the union. What else caught our eyes- Facebook just reinvented digital currency with its Libra cryptocurrency that will launch early next year. No they’re not calling it Zuckerbucks. Libra is like cash that lives inside your phone. Starting in 2020, you’ll be able to purchase Libra through Libra wallet apps on your phone or from some local grocery and convenience stores. You cash in your local currency like dollars and get nearly the same number of Libra coins, which are represented by wavy three-line emoji instead of the $ symbol. But first you’ll have to verify your identity with a photo. You’ll then be able to spend your Libra while online shopping, or potentially pay for things like Ubers or your subscription for Spotify, since those companies have partnered with Facebook to make Libra popular. Since it’s almost free to digitally move Libra from one account to the other, you won’t have to pay high credit card processing fees that can add almost 4% to your total. And some Libra wallet apps and shops will give bonus discounts or free coins for signing up and paying with Libra.…

Mind The Gap by Freshchat

1
Last week in Startups - India - Mind the Gap News 3:44

há 6 years3:44

3:44

In total, this week, 15 startups raised $378.77 Mn funding and four startup acquisitions took place. One of the biggest funding rounds in the Indian startup ecosystem was raised by Druva, marking the entry of cloud data protection firm in the unicorn club. Druva raised $130 Mn in a funding round led by Viking Global Investors. The funds will be used to invest in innovation as well as for strategic acquisitions. Bengaluru-based healthtech platform Practo raised $17.2 Mn (INR 120 Cr ) from Trifecta Capital and other internal investors. The company had floated an offer of INR 70 Cr ($10 Mn) debt from Trifecta. The first tranche has come in this month and the second tranche is expected to come in by December 31, 2019. Bengaluru-based agritech platform Ninjacart raised $10 Mn to close its ongoing Series C round from a clutch of investors, including company’s existing investors Tiger Global, debt venture fund Trifecta Capital, along with Tanglin Venture Fund, Steadview Capital, and ABG Capital. The company will use this investment to expand its supply chain and warehousing capacity. Alteria Capital, which claims to be India’s largest venture debt fund, said to have invested $11.4 Mn (INR 80 Cr) in digital lending startup Lendingkart in the form of venture debt funding. The funds raised will be used to grow the company’s ability to service the MSME community across the country and bring them into the financial mainstream. AI-focussed fintech startup Active.Ai raised $3 Mn from InnoCells, the Barcelona-based innovation hub and corporate venturing vehicle of Banco Sabadell in a Series A follow-on round. Kalaari Capital, Chiratae Ventures (formerly IDG Ventures India) and Vertex Ventures also participated in the latest funding round. This will help the fintech startup to further expands its international footprints. Moving on to acquisitions: Mumbai-based IT services company Hexaware Technologies acquired US-based digital services firm Mobiquity. The stock exchange filing showed that it was an all-cash deal worth $182 Mn. The transaction involves an upfront payment of $131 Mn and deferred payouts of $51 Mn. Bengaluru-based Dailyhunt acquired Local Play, a hyperlocal video content and news content application. The acquisition underscores Dailyhunt’s aggressive strategy of attracting new users, residing in the real ‘Bharat’ – the tier 2, 3 and 4 Indian cities and towns—who are always hungry to stay updated on all the latest hyperlocal happenings. What else caught our eyes? The Indian government’s Department of Science and Technology (DST) launched Cultiv8 Accelerator Program to foster the growth of early-stage tech startups. The program has selected 11 tech startups in its first cohort ranging across healthcare, fintech, industrial IoT, cybersecurity, and agritech, among others.…

Mind The Gap by Freshchat

1
Last week in Startups - India - Mind the Gap News 3:44

há 6 years3:44

3:44

Mind The Gap by Freshchat

1
Last week in startups - India - Mind the Gap News 4:57

há 6 years4:57

4:57

In total, this week, 12 startups raised $35.7 Mn funding and one startup acquisitions took place. This week, this week one of the biggest funding rounds in the Indian startup ecosystem was raised by Bengaluru-based digital application provider for micro-merchants OkCredit. The startup raised $15.5 Mn in a Series A funding round led by New York-based investment fund Tiger Global. Morningside Venture Capital, Lightspeed India Partners, Venture Highway and Y Combinator also participated in this round of funding. The startup will use the funding to further scale its merchant user base, grow its team and execute on its product roadmap. Bengaluru-based social commerce startup Meesho raised an undisclosed amount of funding from social media company Facebook. The deal size is said to be “very significant”, however, there is no official communication on the same. The funding will help it further its efforts to enable independent entrepreneurs to build businesses and grow their customer base via social channels. Gurugram-based GroMo raised $576.7K (INR 4 Cr) seed funding led by Ramakant Sharma, cofounder, Livspace and Utsav Somani of AngelList India as well as other prominent angel investors. The company is planning to utilise the funds to fuel its growth, strengthen its core technology platform and operations team. Retail technology startup Arzoo raised $1 Mn Pre-Series A funding led by Jabbar Internet Group, that founded Middle East’s largest ecommerce platform Souq.com and a consortium of Investors from India and the United Kingdom. The startup plans to expand its retail category by integrating 500,000 retailers by 2022. Authentic Ayurvedic organic handmade skin care products provider Cosmeto Food raised $143K (INR 1 Cr) from Risers Accelerator. The products by the company are made from ECOCERT Certified organic ingredients with tested and authenticated proven formulations. An interactive platform to connect with avid readers in real time Vowelor raised $143K (INR 1 Cr) in a pre-series A round led by angel investor Dr Sanjeev Juneja. The startup will use this funding to develop, implement and market this app to target 150k+ downloads on its app and 200k monthly website hit. Vowelor further plans to partner with Publishers and Bookstores to create an inclusive and organized ecosystem to bridge the gap between readers, authors, and other stakeholders. Moving on to acquisitions: Go-Jek acquired Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence startup AirCTO. The financial terms of the deal are yet to be disclosed. According to the company, the AirCTO team will now join Go-Jek with immediate effect as a part of this deal. The acquisition aligns with Go-Jek’s focus on hiring premium talent to support the development of its ‘Super App’ which can be used for availing various services such as ordering food, commuting, digital payments, shopping, and hyper-local delivery through one app. What else caught our eyes? About ten months into acquiring a majority stake in Flipkart, Walmart has decided to use $1.2 Bn of its cash reserves to fund the operations of the Indian ecommerce marketplace. According to the statement, of the $2.7 Bn ending April 30, 2019, approximately $1.2 Bn can only be accessed through dividends or inter-company financing arrangements subject to approval by Flipkart minority shareholders. The Karnataka Cabinet has decided to amend the Karnataka Startup Policy 2015-2020 in line with the national policy. The state government is amending its policy accordingly by including turnover limit and year limit that is there in the central policy, he told reporters after the Cabinet meeting. Also approved was the 'Chief Minister Grameena Sumarga' programme to maintain priority village roads in the state in a good motorable condition. For this programme using a scientific method, 24,246 kms are selected as priority village roads based on the criteria of connectivity, Gowda said.…

Mind The Gap by Freshchat

1
Last week in startups - Global - Mind the Gap news 7:03

há 6 years7:03