AppsForBharat, Kirana247, Imagimake, Synth, Syook, Lumiq raise funding

AppsForBharat, a product studio focused on building apps for spiritual and devotional needs of users in India, on Tuesday said it has raised $4 million in a seed round of funding co-led by Sequoia Capital India and BEENEXT.

The funding round also saw participation from WEH Ventures, as per a statement, which added that the funds will primarily be used for product development and hiring tech talent.

Founded in November 2020 by Prashant Sachan, AppsForBharat range of products will include high quality spiritual, devotional, wellbeing and meditation-related tools, communities and services, the statement added.

The company also is currently looking to hire product, data and engineering talent.

Kirana247

Kirana247, a Delhi-based on-demand supply chain startup, on Tuesday said it has raised $1 million in its run-up to a bridge round of funding dubbed pre-Series A round and is expected late August.

The early round saw participation from a large financial institution and serial entrepreneurs, as per a statement, which did not disclose the investor identities.

The company will use the capital to scale its fulfillment network and establish 40 micro warehouses that will serve over 100,000 active kirana stores across Delhi-NCR, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Rajasthan.

Founded in 2018 by Tarun Jiwarajka and Pankhuri Jiwarajka, Kirana247 claims to provide just-in-time (JIT) delivery of goods to the kirana store.

It helps reduce infrastructure limitations and improves the efficiency of the supply chain using deep tech, artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions.

The startup said it expects to cross Rs 400 crore (over $53.9 million as per current exchange rates) in annualised gross merchandise value (GMV) in the near term.

Currently, it has onboarded over 5,000 active retail partners on its platform.

On the supplier side, Kirana247 has partnered with manufacturers such as Hindustan Unilever, Marico, Reckitt Benckiser, Godrej, Dabur and Pepsi.

Imagimake

Direct-to-consumer startup Imagimake on Tuesday said it has raised an undisclosed round of financing from revenue-based financier Velocity.

Imagimake manufactures and distributes a range of products -- educational toys, games, puzzles, and 3D model-making sets -- that help children in learning, education and creative development.

Founded by Disha Katharani and Ravi Kuma, Imagimake as an idea dawned upon the founders when they conducted workshops and camps for kids in 2012, and observed that the parents were very appreciative of the fun learning activities.

“With increasing propensity to spend and more discerning millennials entering parenthood, we believe that the market for our educational and creative products is ripe for growth. We plan to use the funds from Velocity.in to finance our new line of products,” Kuma said.

Bengaluru-based Velocity.in itself raised $10.3 million in a seed stage funding round led by Peter Thiel backed venture capital firm Valar Ventures, in March.

It commenced operations in early 2020 and has since worked with over 500 e-commerce businesses.

“Thanks to Velocity.in, we have ready access to funding that can be raised without diluting equity or pledging our assets. We will be using this financing to expand our product lines and fulfil unmet demand in India and other international markets like US, Canada and Mexico," Katharani said.

Imagimake markets its products across over 25 countries globally through both online and offline channels.

Platforms such as Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal, Paytm and FirstCry keep their products along with 2,000 offline stores in India.

Synth

Silicon Valley-based startup accelerator Y Combinator has invested $125,000 in Synth, an AI startup for knowledge workers as part of the Y-Combinator's Summer 2021 batch.

Synth operates as an app that captures all the relevant information one consumes (text, audio, video) in a click and makes it easy to search and retrieve the information the user wants to use it anywhere.

It was founded by Suneel Matham, an IIT Madras alumnus who earlier worked as a data engineer at Noodle.ai, Urvin Soneta, an Ashoka University alumnus, who had earlier worked in corporate banking with RBL Bank and Vaibhav Saxena, a BIT Mesra Alumnus, who was a deep learning visiting researcher at Purdue University.

The founders met during Plaksha's founding cohort of tech leader's fellowship and started working on this during Plaksha’s entrepreneur’s support programme.

“We are solving a problem which we have been personally frustrated with for the past few years.

The existing apps put all the burden on us to capture and organise information and ultimately making it hard to retrieve the right information and ultimately leading us to shift to a new app,” the founders said in a joint statement.

With Synth still being in their beta stage, the company is iterating with users who not just consume huge amounts of information but also create something meaningful from that captured information.

Additionally, Synth is providing its early users AI-generated summary and suggested notes in real-time allowing them to recall meetings, videos, podcasts, interviews and lectures without having to go through long transcripts or recording them.

Syook

Bengaluru-based enterprise technology provider startup Syook on Tuesday said it has raised $1 million from Inflection Point Ventures and ONGC in a Series A round of funding.

Syook helps large enterprise companies with their digital transformation journey in operations across the supply chain using their modular, no-code-IoT platform.

It services the likes of Hindustan Unilever, Reckitt Benckiser, FIAT and the Tata group.

The fresh capital raised will be used to pursue growth in the international markets especially in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and scale up the engineering team, as per a statement.

“We are supporting startups that have an application in the oil and gas sector. We are really happy with the safety, productivity and compliance gains that Syook provides at customer locations. This has a lot of applications both in the upstream and downstream of the energy sector,” ONGC said.

Syook co-founder and CEO Arjun Nagarajan said that the company saw 2X growth in revenues of the financial year ended March 2021, in the order book of the first three months in the current financial year ending March 2021.

Syook’s enterprise operating system for operations efficiency helps enhance the competitive advantage of organisations. This operating system is built on the top of the company’s proprietary RTLS (Real Time Location System) platform.

The platform offers a modular and configurable (no-code) platform for improving the operational efficiency across sectors.

Few key sectors where the platform is being used are oil and gas, manufacturing, auto and healthcare.

Prior to Syook, the co-founders -- Saurabh Sharma, Aman Agarwal and Nagarajan -- spent about a decade each, working in oilfield operations in different parts of the world. Inspired by the ‘Make in India’ movement, they returned to Bangalore about five years ago to build Syook to solve for operational inefficiency, the statement added.

Starting with a small pilot at one factory in North India, Syook currently partners with companies including Microsoft, Accenture, Siemens and Bosch.

Lumiq

Lumiq, a data and analytics company that powers data-driven decision-making for financial enterprises, on Tuesday said it has raised $2 million in a seed round of funding led by Info Edge Ventures.

The round also saw participation from Redstart Labs and angel investor Parampreet Bhasin, as per a statement.

Lumiq plans to utilise the funds in the company’s sales growth, enhancing product offerings as well as expanding their global footprint.

The company has developed over 70 ready to deploy AI/ML data models and is live on over 20 cloud data platforms of financial enterprises.

It has so far analysed over 1 billion customer interactions and influenced more than 100 million customer journeys.

“With the team’s expertise around data science and data engineering, they have been able to achieve over 100% y-o-y growth consistently while remaining in bootstrapped and we hope this round of funding help them accelerate their plans,” Info Edge Ventures Partner Kitty Agarwal said.

Nidhi SSS

Four startups Pillpouch Healthtech, Doubt Buddy Education Technology, Pocketly Infotech and Swipe have received funding of Rs 2 crore (about $269,543) through Nidhi Seed Support System, an umbrella programme conceived and developed by the Innovation & Entrepreneurship division of the Indian government’s Department of Science & Technology.

The startups were incubated by Research Innovation Incubation Design Laboratories (riidl), a not-for-profit organisation under Somaiya Trust, supported by the National Science & Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board (NSTEDB), Department of Science & Technology, Government of India, Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council, Department of Biotechnology, Government of India, Maharashtra State Innovation Society, Government of Maharashtra.

Nidhi SSS said it provides seed funding to promising and innovative startups, to bridge the financial gap in the initial phases that are faced by technologically driven startups.

Pillpouch Healthtech’s MicroDegree aims to empower local technology talent from non-metro with on-demand IT skills in vernacular languages thereby connecting them with right job opportunities at pocket friendly prices.

Doubt Buddy is a 24x7 doubt resolution platform, where students from different classes and subjects can instantly solve doubts in a personalized way. It also caters to all subjects, including the ones covered by JEE and NCERT and provides guidelines and strategies for competitive examinations such as IIT, NIT, IIIT, DTU, DU, AIIMS.

Pocketly Infotech is a micro-lending platform for college students, which provides a credit line to its users from Rs 500-10,000 and builds up the credit score of students to ensure they have access to credit in college.

Swipe is a billing and accounting app for small businesses in India, using which businesses can send a WhatsApp message with a link that allows their customers to pay instantly.

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