Neuron7 plans to use the new funding to grow its product and customer success teams in the US and India. Both teams will enable Neuron7 to continue bringing innovative solutions to the market that help customers as they move to outcome-as-a-service and predictive service business models. 

Customer and field service organizations are significantly impacted by the following three industry trends: 

1. An unprecedented skills shortage due to a tsunami of baby boomers retiring, creating huge losses of “tribal knowledge” of products and customers. 
2. Products such as high-tech electronics, medical devices, and industrial manufacturing equipment are growing more complex and harder to support, every day. 
3. Customers increasingly demand instant answers, often via self-service portals and chatbots. 

These challenges are growing more acute with the economic downturn looming, and service operational excellence and profitability will be even more in focus. 

Neuron7 leverages AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to help service organizations overcome these challenges and greatly improve service metrics like first-time fix, tribal knowledge capture, faster turnaround times, call deflections, and customer satisfaction.

The Neuron7 Service Intelligence Platform is a cloud-based service that extracts intelligence from the two biggest sources of knowledge in an enterprise – its data and its people.

This “Collective Intelligence” is turned into actionable predictions that help people diagnose and resolve any issue in seconds, no matter how complex the issue, and no matter how experienced the service person is.

“Knowledge in an enterprise is siloed. Support, field service, and engineering expertise are spread across systems, data and experts” said Niken Patel, CEO of Neuron7.ai. “Re-thinking the way knowledge/intelligence is captured and shared across silos in the enterprise, Neuron7.ai creates an enterprise-wide Resolution system of record.”

Since its launch last year, Neuron7 has been deployed by Keysight Technologies, Xilinx, Parkview Healthcare, Softtek, and other leading companies.

Neuron7 has also introduced several groundbreaking new AI-powered service intelligence capabilities:

• Intelligent Search – understands the human context of questions to find the exact answer from within a company’s entire body of customer service data & documents
• Intelligent Diagnostics Micro predictions at each step of the diagnostic process lead technicians to success for every issue across every product model. Capture ”how” technicians diagnose and solve each issue 
• Intelligent Telemetry converts data sent by connected devices into actionable insights & preemptive maintenance recommendations.

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Namaste Credit, a digital marketplace and technology platform for SME loans, has raised $3.8 million in a Series A investment round from Nexus Venture Partners.

The company will use the funds to grow its geographic footprint, continue to enhance its technology and data analytics platform and further scale its businesses.

Namaste Credit plans to significantly increase its channel partner programme across India and further expand its technology licensing partnerships with leading lenders globally.

Namaste Credit was co-founded in 2014 by Lucas Bianchi and Gaurav Anand (ex Moody’s) and Krishnan Parameswaran (ex MentorWare, GE).

The startup claims that over the last 12 months, disbursement volumes on Namaste Credit’s platform have increased over 10x with participation of over 30 institutional lenders. Using machine learning and patent pending algorithms, the company has increased its loan conversion rates to over 70 per cent.

Namaste Credit’s 1,000-plus channel partners are 3x to 5x more productive than their peers and are rapidly increasing usage across all geographies. Namaste Credit is also starting to license core technology to several leading NBFCs and Banks.

Anup Gupta, Managing Director, Nexus Venture Partners, adds, “SME credit is seriously constrained due to lack of reach and relevant data to assess credit worthiness of borrowers. Namaste Credit’s technology, combined with its channel partners and lender network, is already making a significant impact on facilitating credit to SMEs in a win-win manner for all.”

According to co-founder Gaurav Anand: “Our technology platform enables lenders to identify potential underwriting issues much faster and also prevent intentional fraud. We provide predictive analytics on banking and financial data of SMEs very efficiently, which helps lenders more accurately assess and price risk.”

SME credit, a $500-plus billion market in India, remains largely traditional and offline. Recently there has been a strong focus by the government on this sector and by private lenders to expand their SME loan books significantly. However, concerns over underwriting and asset quality of SME loans remain.

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LiveHealth, a SaaS startup that digitises records from diagnostic laboratories and makes them available on the cloud to patients and doctors, has raised a seed round of $1.1 million from Mumbai-based VC fund Nexus Venture Partners.

The medtech startup will use the funding to expand its platform across India, explore international markets and to strengthen the product and technology.

Pune-based LiveHealth was founded by Abhimanyu Bhosale and Mukund Malian. It
works with more than 650 diagnostic centres across India and Africa to automate their operations — to manage patients, financial transactions, automation between medical instruments, and inventory. It gives them actionable insights to drive revenue and profitability and also simplifies information exchange with other healthcare providers.

The platform claims to have digitised more than 72 million records and is delivering over 50,000 digital medical records to doctors and patients every day. Doctors and consultants get access to their patient records using a mobile application. Patients can use the Livehealth app to understand reports, analyse past health data, and monitor their health using health trackers, both for themselves and their family, even on a remote basis.

Abhimanyu Bhosale, Co-founder and CEO of LiveHealth, said: “Our focus is on addressing the tech gap in healthcare, and enable seamless interaction among all stakeholders. Our platform becomes one-stop solution for care providers to improve their operations, reduce costs and errors and to enhance collaboration among stakeholders. This also helps us gather huge amounts of data to generate insights and models to improve health care outcomes. Our vision is to build an ecosystem of data driven applications that enables seamless healthcare data management.”

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Stayzilla, a popular online homestay marketplace startup headquartered in Chennai, has shut operations.

In a blog post appeared on Thursday, Stayzilla Co-founder and CEO Yogendra Vasupal said that the team will be looking to reboot it with a different business model.

“I would like to announce today that we would be bringing to a halt the operations of Stayzilla in its current form, and looking to reboot it with a different business model,” Vasupal said in the post. “This has been one of the toughest decisions that I have taken so far but it is the right thing to do.”

Stating the reasons to take the extreme step, Vasupal added: “Despite having a very clear lead, despite a lot of firsts, despite being successful in getting an ecosystem up from scratch pan-India, there are a few reasons why we are at this juncture,” the blog post went on.

“The travel marketplace does not have local network effects and, therefore, we can’t really take a focused city-by-city approach in terms of matching supply and demand. The demand and supply for homestays was non-existent 18 months back, excluding a few small pockets. As a result, we had to invest extensively in both sides of the marketplace, creating homestays as well as guests who would choose a homestay across the country. We were actually successful at this — we have created 8000 homestays in over 900 towns — but this stretched us thin,” he added.

Some of India’s key macro trends further deteriorated our ability to expand quickly and cost effectively. India does not have a lot of public goods, often taken for granted in mature markets like logistics, tech savvy suppliers and online user demand. A homestays marketplace needs to invest in educating the market on the concept and even using Internet and not just the product. The costs, both financial and opportunity costs, creep up on you over a period of time and gets rationalized as cost of doing business in India, he explained.

“This was further exacerbated by the discounting based growth rampant in the travel industry since 2015. Forced to match prices, we could not even recoup what we put in, necessitating very large capital requirement simply to sustain growth,” according to the blog.

Vasupal has also admitted that in the last three to four years, he lost his path. He started treasuring GMV, room-nights and other ‘vanity’ metrics instead of the fundamentals of cash flow and working capital, he rued.

“I have come to realize that the value of a business is extremely subjective, like beauty. While there exist many benchmarks, true beauty is intrinsic and begins with the comfort one has with one’s skin. Similarly, while there exist many benchmarks for valuation of a company, its intrinsic value starts from inside and is tied very closely to the metrics that founders value and their comfort with that selection.

The last year has been a focused attempt to get back to our initial, and stable, value system. However, 12 months was just not enough time to shift paths, when we were already 36 months down a dramatically different path.”

Vasupal said that co-operation and specialization as the mantra for Stayzilla. “Our hosts still have a lot of needs that are unmet and problems that are unsolved. I see Stayzilla becoming a hassle-free distribution channel going out to the right audience, wherever they may be. We will look to work closely with both online and offline travel partners to offer the best of Indian homestays to their valued customers.”

With this announcement, new bookings on all Stayzilla platforms, including website and app,  will stand suspended. Bookings with check-in dates on or before 28th February 2017 will be honoured. Any booking with check-in after that date will be cancelled and the guests will receive 100 per cent refund, reads the post.

Stayzilla was started in 2006 by Vasupal and Rupal Yogendra. In early 2015, the company had raised US$15 million in its Series B round of funding led by Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from existing investor Matrix Partners. It had earlier raised an undisclosed amount in Series A funding from Matrix in October 2013.

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The year 2016 might not have been a big one for large scale funding, but there hasn’t been much of a roadblock for early-stage funding deals, which continue to ride the startup wave. According to data analytics firm Venture Intelligence, there were 107 funding deals this year, almost at par with last year’s figure of 117 deals, for investments within $1 million.

The top deals in this category were raised by Bengaluru-based self-publishing platform Pratilipi which raised $925,000 in seed funding from Nexus Venture Partners,and others, this June.

The trend changed as the deal size increased. For instance, funding rounds between $1 million and $10 million saw a drop from 205 deals last year to 170 deals this year. The big ticket funding rounds of more than $10 million saw only 56 funding rounds this year, compared to last year’s 93.

Parag Dhol, managing director at Inventus Capital Partners, said that 2016 was a good year barring the big deals. “Indian economy is big enough to support several smaller early stage deals whereas it is not big enough to support several above $100 million deals,” he said.

Dhol added that while the big private equity funds or hedge funds have retreated, the interest of small Japanese funds and the Chinese tech companies supporting several Indian startups make him hopeful of the ecosystem doing well. “They have the money and the right intent. Even Softbank, despite the setbacks, has made the right noises,” he said.

NoBroker, a Bengaluru-based home rental platform, was one of the top companies to raise the maximum funding in the $10-50 million category. The company, which raised its initial funding in 2014, had to face a lot more heat this year when it raised two separate funding rounds of $7 million and $10 million each from two different investors.

“The funding environment has been very tough. When you look at the consumer startup space, many have shut shop that has made investors all the more cautious. Investors are focusing unit economics and revenue generation, hence the funding discussion cycles were elongated. Since we had overseas investors on board who wanted to get an understanding of the Indian perspective, the discussion to deal closure took 3-4 months,” says ‘NoBroker’ co-founder Amit Agarwal.

Karthik Reddy, managing partner, Blume Ventures, said that while the early stage deals not slowing down is an encouraging sign, lack of deals at the series A (first substantial institutional funding) stage might choke a few startups. “It has been a perpetual problem in India’s startup ecosystem and we have seen this not changing in the last five years. Either the startups shut down or they are forced to get acquired.”

The VC firm was one of the top five active investors of 2016, according to another data analytics company Tracxn. Reddy added that while there is enough capital with venture funds, investments have not happened. The percentage ratio of series A funding has to go up substantially.

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