Photo credit: Pexels.
This may be the end of a (relatively) tough year when it comes to fund flow for startups. According to venture capital intelligence tracker Tracxn, Indian startups raised funding of only US$3.89 billion in total in 2016. In comparison, startups raised a total of US$7.54 billion last year.
But quite a few startups are still standing to celebrate the holiday season, announcing funding rounds from seed funding to series Bs. Read on to find out who these happy startups are.
10i Commerce
Ecommerce is still an urban phenomenon in India. And just over a quarter of India’s 1.2 billion population lives in its top cities. The rest are still shopping at the brick-and-mortar stores that dot Indian towns and cities. That’s what got Bangalore-based startup 10i Commerce to build ShopX. ShopX gives tech muscle to traditional retailers. Its aim is to make “products, content, and services available to the 600 million consumer mass market in India.”
The startup recently raised US$5 million from Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani. Nandan had invested an undisclosed amount in 10i earlier as well. 10i’s mission fits squarely into Nandan’s area of interest – digitalizing non-urban India. He headed India’s unique ID project, Aadhaar, and is one of the masterminds of the government’s Digital India program.
Reports say 10i is Nandan’s biggest startup investment so far. Last year, he invested US$7.5 million in Mumbai-based auto parts company Sedemac Mechatronics. 10i was founded by Amit Sharma and Apoorva Jois, who had earlier built niche ecommerce firm Go Untucked.
See: 25 failed startups in India this year and what you can learn from them
Shadowfax
Hyperlocal delivery startup Shadowfax has raised US$10 million in series B funding from Eight Roads Ventures, an investment arm of Fidelity International. It had raised US$8.5 million from the same investor last year.
The investment comes at a time when several food and grocery delivery startups have become unsustainable because of poor margins and a funding squeeze. Shadowfax diversified from food delivery to enter the ecommerce, pharmacy, and grocery delivery verticals to improve its unit economics.
The startup was founded by Abhishek Bansal and his college mate Vaibhav Khandelwal in May 2015. Snapdeal co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, Zishaan Hayath of Powai Lake Ventures, and Prashant Malik of Limeroad pumped in the seed round of funding for Shadowfax.
See: Meet the new Bansal making waves in Indian ecommerce
Dekkho
Cocktail. Photo credit: HD wallpapers.
Video-streaming app Dekkho raised seed funding of US$1.2 million from seven angel investors. The app is not live yet; it’s scheduled to launch in January 2017.
India already has several video streaming services like Spuul, Hotstar, and ErosNow. Besides, in January this year, Netflix launched in the country. And now, there’s Amazon Prime as well.
But Dekkho has a different business model. It doesn’t charge users for videos. It also lets users share, recommend, and comment on the videos. The startup was founded in March 2016 by Tanay Desai and Vinay Pillai, who met while they were working at Booz Allen Hamilton in the US.
See: Amazon Prime Video goes live in India. Watch out Netflix, Flipkart
ShopKirana
Photo credit: Wikimedia.
Indore-based startup ShopKirana helps local retail stores board the ecommerce wagon. It brings kirana stores online with a mobile app for buying and selling, improves backend supply chain for them by partnering with FMCG brands, and helps stores track inventory and purchasing.
The startup, founded by Tanutejas Saraswat, Sumit Ghorawat, and Deepak Dhanotiya in February 2015, raised a bridge round of funding from Japanese seed-stage investors Incubate Fund. Mumbai-based Lead Angels Group and senior executives from leading FMCG companies participated in the funding round.
See: 11 reasons why online grocery startups are failing in India
Pandorum
It currently 3D-prints experimental-stage human liver tissues in a laboratory.
Biotech startup Pandorum Technologies uses proprietary technology to design and manufacture functional, three-dimensional, living human tissues – intended for medical research, therapeutic, and other applications. Research scholars Arun Chandru and Tuhin Bhowmick founded the company in 2011.
It currently 3D-prints experimental-stage human liver tissues in a laboratory and has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Indian ecommerce major Flipkart founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal.
The company is also backed by the Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council, Department of Biotechnology, GoI. Pandorum is based in the Center for Cellular and Molecular Platforms, National Centre for Biological Sciences campus, Bangalore.
See: High-speed unicorn: Chinese biotech startup valued at $1b just months after being founded
The Postbox
The Postbox founders Nikhil and Madhuvanthi.
26-year-old mechanical engineer Nikhil Joseph founded ecommerce firm The Postbox with NAFA design graduate Madhuvanti Senthilkumar, 23, a few months ago. The startup began as a curated platform for artists. Today it works with 250 artisans across India, offering functional art and lifestyle products designed by an in-house team.
Tech in Asia wrote about The Postbox last week. The startup raised an undisclosed amount of funding from multiple investors, including The Chennai Angels, Facebook’s head of policies Ritesh Mehta, and Aruna Ganesh Ram, founder of performance company Visual Respiration.
See: She is 23. He is 26. Together they are trying to make art scalable
Innoplexus
Big data and analytics startup Innoplexus helps companies make better decisions. Its proprietary framework crawls and aggregates billions of data points from data sources and uses machine learning and interactive visualizations to mine business intelligence.
Innoplexus, which has a base in Germany besides India, raised funding from HCS, a Germany-based venture capital fund. The startup was founded by IIT-Bombay alumni Bhardwaj and Gaurav Tripathi in 2011. It counts some global pharma and life sciences companies, including many Fortune 500 companies, in its client roster. It helps them get insights across the pre-clinical, clinical, regulatory, and commercial stages of drugs.
See: 10 reasons why startups fail – from the confessions of founders
Zoomcar
Zoomcar CEO Greg Moran. Photo credit: Zoomcar.
Last month, Tech in Asia wrote about car rental startup Zoomcar’s plans to expand outside India. The startup has now raised funding to do just that. The amount of investment, which came from Chinese venture capital firm Cyber Carrier, was not disclosed.
“Going global is the next big thing. Not this year, but I think 18 months out that makes sense. There are a lot of big markets there where people are hungry for the same things Indians are hungry for.” Zoomcar co-founder Greg Moran had told Tech in Asia.
Zoomcar had raised US$24 million in a series B round led by Ford Smart Mobility, a subsidiary of Ford Motors, in August. Its existing investors Sequoia Capital, Nokia Growth Partners, and Empire Angels had participated in that round. The latest funding is an extension of the same round.
The company is considering Indonesia, the Philippines, Nigeria and other African markets as potential markets to expand its operations.
See: Millions still in the bank, GoZoomo shuts shop, returns VC money. The whole story.
ChatterOn
Delhi-based startup ChatterOn helps developers make chatbots. Its AI platform claims to build functional chatbots in just five minutes.
Founded in October 2015 by IIT Delhi grads Adit Jain, Anand Prajapati, Mayank Goyal, and Narendra Kumar, ChatterOn raised an undisclosed amount of seed investment from HT Media and US-based North Base Media.
“Powerful bots will be made only with the amalgamation of flow and AI, and this is exactly what we want to provide with our platform, which will be in private beta soon,” co-founder Adit Jain wrote on Tech in Asia last week.
See: You only need 2 things to build a kickass UX for your chatbot
Supr Daily
Photo credit: Pixabay.
Subscription startup Supr Daily delivers daily consumables like milk, bread, fresh juices, and eggs at your doorstep. The Mumbai-based company founded by IIT-Bombay alumni Puneet Kumar and Shreyas Nagdawane raised seed funding from Venture Catalysts angel investors Dr. Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, Anil Jain, Anuj Golecha, Krishna Jhunjhunwal, and Anirudh Damani.
Other angel investors, including Dheeraj Jain of Redcliffe Capital and Harsh Rajgarhia of Overnite Express, participated in the funding round.
The startup says its business model enables per-order delivery costs as low as INR 1-3 (US$0.01-O.04); the ecommerce benchmark of delivery cost per order is INR 50 (US$0.73). This has “enabled Supr Daily to already achieve operational profitability, and was instrumental in helping it secure a previous seed investment from Snapdeal founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal,” a statement from the company said.
Supr Daily currently operates in parts of Mumbai. The seed funding raised will help scale up its pan-Mumbai operations in the next 6 months.
See: India’s biggest funding stories of 2016
GetBike
Go-Jek, arguably Indonesia’s biggest and most well-known startup, is best known for its motorbike-hailing service, which runs through an app. Photo credit: Go-Jek.
Anyone who has been to India would tell you that bikes are the best mode of transport if you’re particular about reaching your destination on time. The road infrastructure is still not great; even those who have swanky cars at home prefer to zip around on two-wheelers.
So it was no surprise that bike-taxis arrived a year or so ago. Hyderabad-based Vave Infosolutions India Pvt. Ltd, which runs motorcycle-sharing startup Getbike, is a provider of such bike taxis. It raised US$100,000 in angel funding from a group of investors, including
Vamshi Reddy B and Venu Veeramaneni.
Getbike launched in September 2016 with 50 bikes. Uber also runs its bike-sharing service UberMOTO in Hyderabad. Last year, bike-taxi startup Baxi raised a seed funding round of US$1.5 million. A similar service, Rapido, raised a pre-series A round of funding from investors including Hero MotoCorp Ltd chairman Pawan Munjal and Google India managing director Rajan Anandan in April this year.
See: The Go-Jeks of India are arriving
EventsHigh
Photo credit: Santabanta.
Every time I visit Facebook, my friends are talking of some cool event they went to – a poetry reading there, a Sufi concert here, and so on. I wonder, “how did I not know that this was happening?” Bangalore and other metro cities of India have bustling events calendars, and EventsHigh helps you track them.
The startup, operational in Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, and Chennai, raised funding from Axilor Ventures. “The fascinating thing about event marketplaces is that these are transitioning into communities and thriving ecosystems. EventsHigh is unique as it is more than a listing platform. Being tech-enabled, it has the potential to change the way events are consumed by users,” Kris Gopalakrishnan, chairman of Axilor Ventures and co-founder of India’s IT behemoth Infosys, said in a statement.
See: Not your run-of-the mill ecommerce app: meet India’s first online flea market
Converted from Indian rupees. US$1 = INR 68.12
This post 12 rising startups in India – Dec 28, 2016 appeared first on Tech in Asia.
from Tech in Asia https://www.techinasia.com/12-rising-startups-dec-28-2016
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