The investment scenario in India’s startup ecosystem continues to stay resilient amid growing chorus over economic slowdown. Even though big funding rounds and high profile startups continued to remain conspicuously absent but the week still proved to be a decent one on the fundraising front.
Apart from Delhivery and JioSaavn, other startups that managed to raise funds were relatively small and unbranded startups. Here are the top 10 funding activities of this week as we rap up our startup weekly funding section.
Delhivery: Gurgaon based unicorn startup Delhivery raised this one of the biggest funding rounds of this week, after it secured $ 115 Mn from existing investor Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB). Following the latest funding, CPPIB has acquired 8% stake in the SoftBank backed company. Delhivery commanded the valuation of $ 1.5 bn, roughly the same valuation that it commanded during the last funding round in the march.
Delhivery said that it is on the way to achieve the 500 million in cumulative shipments. Last year, the Gurgaon based startup had shipped 250 Mn shipments, as per the company’s official website.
JioSaavn Music: Mukesh Ambani owned Reliance Industries pumped nearly Rs 140.35 crore ($125 Mn) in its subsidiary and music streaming firm Jio Saavn, according to investment platform Paper.vc. The funding comes nearly one-and-half year after it acquired the music streaming company, which was founded more than a decade ago. The acquisition deal, which was almost worth $1 bn deal, led to merger of Reliance owned Jio Music and Saavn.
OkCredit: B2B Fintech startup OkCredit mopped up $67 Mn from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Tiger Global. Bengaluru based startup helps small business owners to digitize their bookkeeping accounts. The company claims to have more than 1.7 Mn active small merchants on board. Following the latest fundraising proceedings, the startup’s total fundraising amount has now reached to whopping $ 83 Mn. Barely few months ago, it had raised the largest series A funding round in the B2B Fintech space.
Nocca Robotics: Pune headquartered solar panel cleaning startup Nocca Robotics secured investment worth Rs 12.4 crore from IAN Fund – an investment firm that specializes in seed funding. Clutch of angel investors from Indian Angel Network also participated in the funding round. Leveraging the cutting edge technologies like Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, this Pune based startup manufactures water-less solar plant cleaning robot for utility scale solar plants.
The company said that it will use the latest capital infusion to develop a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility for producing efficient robots. The firm also plans to ramp up its R&D and consolidate its production team in order to manufacture best in the class robots.
Fitso: Sports startup Fitso fetched funding of $ 1.5 Mn from SRI Capital, Zomato Co-founder Pankaj Chaddah and Helion Ventures founder Ashish Gupta. The startup plans to use the latest capital infusion to ramp up its number of indoor all-weather swimming pools, talent acquisition and enhance technology to boost its operation.
Fitso currently operates two verticals – Fitso Seal and Fitso Flash. The former offers best in the class swimming facilities that is open round the year in Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Ghaziabad and Faridabad. Highly skilled and certified swimming coaches undertake the swimming classes
Truebil: India’s auto-sector is currently facing one of its worst crises but this didn’t deter Japanese venture capital firm Spiral Ventures in reposing faith in used car marketplace Truebil. The Japanese VC firm pumped $1 Mn (approximately Rs 7.12 crore) in the Mumbai based company. The company plans to use the funds to consolidate its technological infrastructure.
Barely few months, Truebil fetched $14 million (around Rs 100 crore) through Series B funding round. The company operates pre-owned cars and offers services such as affordable car loans and other gamut of services.
Hungry Foal: Healthy and FMGC startup Hungry Foal secured much needed funding boost after raising undisclosed amount of funding in pre-series A funding round . Singapore-headquartered Madison Capital spearheaded the round while clutch of independent investors including Innerchef cofounder Rajesh Sawhney also participated in the round. The startup said that it will use the funds for R&D purposes, improving the distribution channels and consolidating the product’s branding.
Prior to this funding round, the company had raised funds from State Bank of India (under startup India scheme).
Qdesq: Today co-working space is widely considered as one of the sunrise sectors of Indian economy and this week this fact was again validated after Gurgaon based co-working startup Qdesq raised undisclosed amount of funding. The funding was secured from JLL Spark, the Silicon Valley-headquartered venture capital division of JLL.
Currently, Qdesq operates 2,200 centres and 500,000 desks across 35 Indian cities including major metropolitan cities.
Marsplay: Fashion led product discovery platform Marsplay secured undisclosed amount of funding from Venture Highway. Alvin Tse from Xiaomi, and Jonathan Lau, Partner, Cadorna Ventures along with clutch of angel investors also infused funds in the round. The New Delhi based startup plans to use the capital infusion for ramping up its product engineering team and create a strong creator community.
Kawa Space: We rarely get to hear about space startups getting funded by a prominent businessman. Therefore, the news of Paytm’s founder & CEO, Vijay shekhar sharma, investing undisclosed amount of funding in a space startup Kawa Space may have taken quite a few people by surprise.
The Mumbai based space startup develops advanced earth observation satellite constellations for clients hailing from various sectors. The company said that it will use the funds for expansion purposes, especially for expanding its team in Bengaluru and San Francisco.
