Other investors include its current investors Endiya Partners, Beyond Next Ventures, and Pratithi Investment Trust.

The company will use this funding to expand into international markets.

Myelin Foundry’s platforms deploy Edge AI to provide what it claims to be unparalleled video and audio experiences and outcomes.

Myelin has developed products for media & entertainment and intelligent mobility.

Its clients include leading streaming services and automotive OEMs.

Myelin Foundry was founded in January 2019 by Dr. Gopichand Katragadda and Ganesh Suryanarayanan.

According to recent market reports, the global market for Edge AI is estimated to be $8 billion by 2027, driven by factors such as advancements in AI-powered Edge solutions for factories, mobility, and entertainment.

The post Deeptech AI startup Myelin Foundry raises $3M Series A appeared first on Startagist.

Leading global and domestic institutions and family offices have participated in the fund, including HDFC Life and SIDBI. 

The fund will primarily invest in eight to ten early-growth, digital and tech startups with a ticket size of $6 million to $10 million. 

Z3Partners has already made five investments — cybersecurity startup Cyfirma, social e-commerce firm DealShare, agritech platform Gramophone, SaaS-based logistics management leader Shipsy, and AI-led celebrity engagement platform True-Fan. 

DealShare had also turned unicorn in 2022 after its $165 million Series E financing round.

Founded in 2019 by Gautam Patel Z3Partners is an early-growth stage investor-operator that invests across early-growth companies in Series A/B stage. The fund’s core investment themes focus on SaaS, fintech, e-commerce, B2B commerce, agritech, Big Data, consumer-tech and all things tech-enabled. 

Z3Partners is an investor-operator and closely engages with founders to help them refine their GTM and makes customer introductions to accelerate growth. The fund also lends support from time to time in helping its portfolio companies with digital and product marketing strategy, and developing and retaining senior talent. 

Z3Partners also announced Rishi Maheshwari joining as co-founder and managing partner. He has over 18 years of investment management and investment banking experience across the U.S., India and Emerging Markets and has held several senior management and board positions in organisations locally and internationally. 

Gautam Patel, founder and managing partner, said, “At Z3Partners, our vision is to identify the most disruptive and cutting-edge startups and provide them with necessary support to grow into market leaders. The same philosophy is reflected across our LP base, too, with market leaders like HDFC Life and SIDBI as our Fund investors; resulting in a final close well ahead of schedule. We are also delighted to welcome Rishi to Z3Partners. He and I invested in BigBasket together and are looking forward to building Z3Partners into the premium digital and tech investment platform of choice in India.”

The post Z3Partners hits final close of new fund at $67M appeared first on Startagist.

The capital will help it to launch the app at a rapid time-to-market pace and accelerate customer acquisition.

It also intends to invest in product development to rapidly enhance customer experience and focus on offering features that can enhance neo-banking experience for the youth in India.

The startup was founded in 2021 by Harsh Chhatrapati and Arun Iyer. It focuses on bringing efficient banking solutions to the youth, with the purpose to simplify money management and make savings as stress-free as possible.

With the AI technology, the Galgal app is built to notify users when they overspend, or underspend. This is based on understanding efficient money management behaviour is developed like any habit on the basis of reward and punishment.

The user has the option to feel good, or guilty about an expense, in order to be more mindful the next time they choose to spend.

Founder Harsh Chhatrapati said, “While pursuing my education at Imperial College London, I found myself facing an issue that most students in this day and age face, Money Management. With stipulated pocket money and plethora of potential expenses we young adults end up getting frustrated when we see a massive difference between what we want to save and can actually achieve. This led me to want to build a feel good solution that will change banking for the youth in India, and simplify money management for all. Inspired by the Indian lemon, Galgal’s mission is to help users ‘squeeze the most out of their money’.”

Co-founder Arun Iyer said, “We saw great opportunity in this problem. Presently, Gen z makes up 375 million, which is over 25 per cent of India’s population, whether they are students, 1st jobbers, fresh out of college, or hustlers.”

Galgal offers a visa prepaid card without charging a credit fee or any other hidden charges, unlike most of the other players in the market.

Just at the beta stage of the product, the company generated a waitlist of more than 5,000 people through its website.

The post Fintech startup Galgal Money raises $1M in seed funding appeared first on Startagist.

WATI plans to use the funds for scaling the teams, product enhancement, and expanding  the customer base in India and key markets.

The new round brings the firm’s total raised since 2020 to more than US$35 million. It earlier raised $8.3 million in Series A ten months ago.

Bianca Ho and Ken Yeung launched WATI in 2020 to help SMEs with a self-service, low-code product on the WhatsApp Business API.

The company enables companies to have scalable, yet personalised conversations with its customer engagement software that is built on WhatsApp’s Business API. Through the WATI platform, SMEs can support their customers through a collaborative team inbox with multiple agents, smart routing, canned responses, data tagging, and analytics. Many of these interactions can be automated through low-code workflow builders and chatbots. 

WATI has over 6,000 customers across 78 countries, including SMEs providing domestic house cleaning services to schools, tutorial centres, medical institutions and e-commerce, and Shopify stores. 

Ho said: “We doubled down on our product with more automations, making it a seamless digital tool and must-have for any business. We went vertical in our approach and created integrations and partnerships with Zoho, Shopify, Google Sheets among others to really help scale growth and sharpen the product. The team has grown, revenue and customer numbers have doubled and now we look to scale the business, operations, teams around the world.”

Yeung added: “The business messaging market has grown enormously. Meta estimates that around a billion people per week communicate with a business or service account across WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. This insight is critical for what’s happening now and what’s coming ahead. About 40 per cent of Meta’s advertisers globally — over 4 million businesses — use click-to-message ads, which redirect people from Facebook or Instagram into one of Meta’s messaging products to chat with a business. WATI is well placed to service this demand and beyond.”

The post Customer, Sales Engagement Tool WATI Raises $23M appeared first on Startagist.

Inflection Point Ventures, Venture Catalysts, and unnamed HNIs also joined. 

The startup will utilize the funds for brand building, growing the private label portfolio, offline retail, technology, and marketing and sales-driven strategies. 

Launched in 2018 by Naina Ruhail, Prateek Ruhail, and Sahil Shrestha, Vanity wagon is a one-stop solution for beauty needs for clean beauty and wellness products. It helps save time and money on product discovery while also getting access to authentic brand-sourced products.

Vanity wagon, which operates in a $1 billion market, earlier raised $1 million in seed funding in 2021.  

Director & co-CEO Naina Ruhail commented, “Our vision is to build a sustainable and legacy brand in the beauty segment, which will only be strengthened by this investment. Furthermore, our strategy to go omnichannel, co-own more clean beauty brands, and expand internationally is what a part of this investment will be deployed in. The beauty market and the e-retail market are going through an interesting time, where every enterprise is trying to establish a market presence.”

Vanity Wagon deploys the latest technologies in assembling a clean beauty community and builds a holistic company with several revenue streams around beauty. It aims to be an INR 500 cr company in the next two years. 

The clean beauty and wellness company has onboarded 350+ on the portal with 15 per cent international brands with the launch of five new international brands in India. It aims to achieve 5x sales growth with acquired brands. 

According to Statista’s analysis, the global clean beauty market is anticipated to grow to over $54 billion by 2027. 

The post Clean beauty marketplace Vanity Wagon secures $2M appeared first on Startagist.

India- and Silicon Valley-based legal tech platform Oddr has raised $2 million in a seed round led by Saama Capital and Twin Ventures.

The round also saw participation from angels in the US, Singapore and Germany.

The funds will be used to build the flagship product AI-powered invoice-to-cash platform for professional services (law firms, accounting firms, consulting firms, and financial services firms).

Started in 2022 by Milan Bobde, Sumit Garg, and Saurabh Mehra, Oddr aims to automate the billing process, which is primarily manual today. The manual process leads to invoice delays, higher write-offs, payment delays and high overhead costs for collections for professional services firms.

Oddr is gearing to launch its services in North America, the UK, and Australia, with an R&D centre in India.

Oddr has entered into a strategic partnership with key industry product companies in the professional services vertical to accelerate MVP and customer acquisition.

Milan Bobde, co-founder CEO of Oddr, said: “Invoice-to-cash process in professional services firms today is manual, fragmented, and cumbersome resulting in high days sales outstanding (DSO), high write-offs and painfully high operating overheads. Oddr helps firms streamline the invoice to cash processes through AI, automation and data-driven approach. As we enter international markets, we aim to touch an ARR of $1 million in the next 18-24 months.”

The post Oddr raises $2M for its AI-powered invoice-to-cash platform for law firms appeared first on Startagist.

The company aims to utilise the funds to design new-age business risk covers, invest in its proprietary risk management technology, and scale the business and teams.

“In India, nearly 95 per cent of startups/MSMEs are uninsured. Most businesses do not realize that having the right insurance coverage is key to their company’s financial health and success. Insurance is still treated as a sunk cost or an obstacle rather than a tool for sustained growth,” said BimaKavach Founder Tejas Jain.

“We want to fix commercial insurance from scratch by building suitable startup and SME-focused insurance products and automating risk assessment and pricing tools for commercial risks to reach many businesses. The idea is to make businesses aware of their insurances and get them covered transparently at the right time, with appropriate covers at fair pricing,” he added.

BimaKavach is a platform that enables companies to discover, buy and manage insurance online, thus helping to build an effortless and accessible ecosystem of commercial insurance. It aims to ease the tedious process of procuring insurance, lengthy paperwork, unexplained jargon and long turnaround times.

Through its platform, BimaKavach offers a variety of insurance product suggestions, such as Fidelity Insurance, Cyber Risk Insurance, Directors & Officers Insurance, Errors & Omissions Insurance, General Liability Insurance, and Product Liability Insurance. 

BimaKavach platform recommends insurance products by answering six simple questions to cover the custom needs of businesses depending upon its nature of risks, size etc.

The company’s early adopters include CleverTap, CoinDCX, and FinBox and listed enterprises such as Rama Phosphates, Flexituff Ventures, and Commercial Syn Bags. 

BimaKavach soon plans to launch co-created commercial insurance products with the country’s top insurers for SMEs and startups to offer only appropriate covers and not give a template solution.

The post B2B insurtech startup BimaKavach raises $2M seed money appeared first on Startagist.

Global Founders Capital, Y Combinator, Soma Capital and seasoned angels such as Alan Rutledge and Gokul Rajaram also joined. 

The startup will the money to expand its 10-member team to 30 in the next six months. It will also create products like remittances, savings accounts, and investments.

Founded in 2022 by Parth Garg, a Stanford dropout, Vance aims to change the way global citizens engage with financial services. Its vision is to build an all-encompassing banking platform, allowing users to seamlessly manage separate accounts, exchange currencies, and eventually invest in equities across markets.

Unlike multi-currency wallets, a Vance account allows users to transact using local rails in different countries. The goal is to enable users to use direct debit in the US while seamlessly leveraging India’s UPI rails through the same account.

Vance was born out of Parth’s personal experience when he moved to India eight months ago and faced challenges in getting a credit card despite having a credit history in the US and the UAE.

Parth Garg, Founder and CEO Vance, said, “Banking and payments have come leaps and bounds over the last decade, but when it comes to international transactions, we still run on archaic systems. It is time to rethink global banking from the ground up. With an ever increasing global population, a global bank is the need of the hour more than ever.” 

With Vance, international travellers can spend like locals, migrants can send personal remittances to their home country at live rates, and cross-border freelancers can receive payments without the hefty commissions.

It envisions a world where you don’t need multiple bank accounts in multiple countries to be financially included in an ecosystem. The goal is to build a borderless banking account that opens up realms of using banking products that are currently not possible.

Vance will let people bank in any country through just one interface. 

Vance was a part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 batch and plans on going live in the UAE and UK by the end of 2022. By Q1 2023, the goal is to launch in five additional countries.

The post Vance raises $5.8M to let people bank in any country through one interface appeared first on Startagist.

The BOLT LITE charging sockets are available at an introductory price of INR 2,599 ($32).

BOLT LITE has been designed to address all the issues arising from ineffective home charging. It is compatible with two, three and four-wheel EVs, requires no additional infrastructure, and can be installed in under 30 minutes with little to no maintenance. 

It offers dual layer protection with an in-built MCB that automatically switches off electrical circuits during any abnormal condition in the electrical network, such as overload and short circuit conditions. Furthermore, the smart energy meter provides bifurcation for energy consumed by the BOLT LITE charging socket vs the home’s power supply via the BOLT app. 

BOLT LITE is IP65 certified and therefore provides complete protection from dust, oil, water and other non-corrosive material and can endure all weather conditions. BOLT LITE gives an efficient power transfer, and users get faster charging to help ensure their EV is fully charged overnight.

It is also IoT-enabled and helps connect EV users across the country. It comes with an energy calculator to monitor power consumption and gives users access to a lifetime of passive income. 

Owners can choose to switch the device status between ‘Public’ and ‘Private’, where ‘Public’ charging sockets are open to the public and are available for booking on the BOLT app. The charging sockets marked as ‘Private’ are exclusively for the use of device owners. 

Furthermore, BOLT LITE can be operated with or without the BOLT app and supports Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and WiFi communication. When set to private mode, BOLT LITE does not require the internet or the BOLT app to be operated.

Consumers can place an order for BOLT LITE via the BOLT website, any of the channel partners or dealers/distributors. BOLT has partnered with more than 25 OEMs globally, including seven out of the top 10 OEMs in India, to build a safe, smart and connected ecosystem for electric vehicles.

According to the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, India has more than 1.3 million EVs on the road as of August 2022. This year’s EV sales have gone up over 3x compared to FY 2020-21. 

India targets to achieve EV sales penetration of 30 per cent for private cars, 70 per cent for commercial vehicles and 80 per cent for two and three-wheelers by 2030. India needs safe, smart and affordable EV charging solutions for homes to achieve this. The presence of safe EV chargers at home not only provides users with the convenience of charging their EVs but also boosts confidence among people considering purchasing them.

According to reports, more than 80 per cent of EV owners charge their vehicles at home due to the convenience and low cost of residential charging. Most EVs come with an onboard charger which allows users to plug their vehicles into a standard 15A charging socket directly. 

However, apart from being slow and least energy efficient, these sockets do not offer any direct safety or monitoring features and are not recommended for long-term EV charging. Unsafe charging at home using a standard 15A socket can result in sudden power surges, damaging the EV battery. 

News reports of EV batteries bursting into fire and creating blazes in India have been primarily due to the owner not knowing how to charge a battery safely. EV users also face challenges with power theft, access control and unidentified energy consumption in shared parking spaces.

The post BOLT introduces smart EV charging socket for home appeared first on Startagist.

The India Spotlight report is part of Flourish’s Digitizing the Corner Shop report, conducted in partnership with research firm 60 Decibels and e-commerce platform ApnaKlub.

According to the report, 90 per cent ($540 billion out of $600 billion) of grocery sales are conducted via kirana. The report further iterates that about 92 per cent of the Indian respondents intended to purchase as much or more from their local kirana store in the future.

The global report surveyed shopkeepers and corner shop customers across India, Egypt, Brazil, and Indonesia and developed a framework to understand the digitized corner shop opportunity.

The report discovered that technology startups are providing corner shops with low-cost and online tools in all four markets, which can unlock over a 60-100 per cent increase in corner shop earnings when implemented at scale.

Within the India research, the study surveyed 200 kirana and 198 of their customers to learn first-hand about the kiranas’ business pain points, competitive threats, aspirations, and digital behaviours.

The findings reveal that despite macro headwinds of inflation, pandemic disruptions, and competition from e-commerce, not only are kirana stores surviving as essential parts of local economies, but they also have an opportunity to thrive by digitising key areas of business.

Commenting on the report, Harsh Gupta, Investor (India) at Flourish Ventures, said, “Kiranas are not going away; they are integral to local communities and a significant part of India’s overall retail ecosystem. These small shops are uniquely positioned with their local customers, which we expect will help them hold up under competitive pressure from bigger stores. The small shops can also maintain competitiveness through digitising and automating business functions.”

“Kirana shopkeepers have shown high adoption of digital tools and ambition to use them more to improve store operations and offerings. We see a great opportunity for digital platforms to step in and consolidate parts of a highly disaggregated market while tackling the operational pain points that kiranas face,” he added.

With respect to the factors that drove value for kirana to its customers, location (86 per cent), product quality and variety (51 per cent), and longstanding relationships with store owners (42 per cent) topped the survey. Additionally, around 33 per cent of surveyed customers regularly use the store credit to purchase items.

Despite kirana stores’ essential role in the economy, shopkeepers still face business challenges, particularly sourcing and purchasing inventory, managing stock, and serving customers. The research found:

• The top three biggest business challenges identified by shopkeepers include finding and keeping customers (74 per cent), competitive prices (67 per cent), and product variety and quality (57 per cent).
  
• The biggest pain points during operational stages included ordering, checking, and receiving products during inventory purchases (74 per cent), managing inventory and product placement at the store management stage (60 per cent), and attending to customers during the selling stage (74 per cent), which can include online channels such as messaging apps.
  
• Shopkeepers are already adopting digital tools. A vast majority of surveyed shopkeepers are comfortable with digital tools and are already using apps and websites to purchase inventory and messaging apps to communicate with suppliers and/or customers. However, barriers to adoption do exist; 26 per cent of shop owners reported difficulty in learning or adopting new tools, and 16 per cent cited monetary costs.
  
• Shopkeepers are eager to adopt more digital tools as they believe these tools can bring business efficiencies. More than half (54 per cent) of surveyed shopkeepers said they plan to increase digital tool usage for inventory sourcing and delivery from suppliers in the next one to two years.

The post Embedded finance tools have potential to double kirana shop earnings: Study appeared first on Startagist.