Start-Ups

Raise Financial Services, a fintech platform, announced on January 25 that it had raised $22 million in a Series A funding round. BEENEXT and its existing investor Mirae Asset Venture Investments led the round. 3one4 Capital, Rocketship.vc, and angel investors such as Meesho co-founders Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal, Pine Labs CEO Amrish Rau, Udaan co-founder Sujeet Kumar, neobanking platform Jupiter founder Jitendra Gupta, and Sandeep Tandon of Whiteboard Capital also participated in the round. Raise Financial Services was founded in January 2021 by former Paytm Money CEO Pravin Jadhav…

Reevoy, a B2B cross-border trade startup, has raised $4 million in seed funding led by 9Unicorns and VCAT. Better Capital, Earlsfield Capital Partners, Kunal Shah, Anupam Mittal, Ketan Patel, and Hanumantha Kumar also participated in the round, the company announced on January 25. The funds will be used to further develop Reevoy’s supply-chain technology and embedded finance capabilities. Ankur Khetan, co-founder of Reevoy said, “In today’s world, where ordering a Rs 50 coffee on an app gives us hundreds of restaurants to choose from and shows us minute-by-minute visibility on…

Newark-based Contlo, an AI-powered Customer Data and Marketing Platform for Ecommerce and Direct-to-Consumer brands, announced today that it has raised $800,000 (Rs 5.98 crore) in a new funding round led by Better Capital, Titan Capital, and other prominent angels. Contlo assists ecommerce stores and direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands in increasing sales, driving customer loyalty, and retaining customers through omnichannel customer engagement methods such as email, text, push, Facebook, Google, WhatsApp, and even physical direct mail. The SaaS startup, which is used by 500+ ecommerce and D2C brands worldwide, was founded by…

Navi Finserv, Navi’s non-banking financial company (NBFC), announced on Tuesday that it has disbursed personal loans worth INR 1750 crore in the fiscal year 2021. According to the NBFC, 85 percent of disbursed loans in 2021 were approved in 10 minutes or less, with the fastest loan approval taking 45 seconds. The company received loan applications from over 97 percent of India’s PIN codes and served customers in over 4500 cities across every state and union territory. Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, and Jaipur were the top five cities for Navi’s…

WeWork Inc. is making its first acquisition as a public company — and the first since current CEO Sandeep Mathrani took over from the company’s embattled co-founder, Adam Neumann. WeWork, headquartered in New York, has agreed to acquire Common Desk, a coworking startup with 23 locations in Texas and North Carolina. Common Desk will continue to exist as a separate brand. The majority of Common Desk’s locations — 19 out of 23 — are managed by management agreements, a common hotel industry arrangement that allows the company to run a…

Isthara Coliving has acquired Letsmobility, a software product engineering firm, in order to digitise its operations and introduce cutting-edge technology solutions to the fragmented coliving industry. The Hyderabad-based firm will collaborate with Letsmobility to create Framework 2.0, which will improve the digital interface of the company’s customer-facing applications. “At Letsmobility, we have always aimed to engineer high-impact tech solutions, accelerate growth and add tremendous value to brands in a rapidly changing ecosystem,” cofounder Gaurav Sharma said. “By joining forces with Isthara, the products we develop will be in better use…

Retool, a low-code platform based in San Francisco, is expanding its presence in India with exclusive offerings as it gains traction among IT service providers and startups alike. The company, which was founded in 2017, was recently valued at $1.85 billion. Low-code development platforms (LCDP) offer a development environment for creating application software using a graphical user interface rather than traditional hand-coded computer programming. Retool is launching a free tier that will allow developers to create more apps and share them with more teammates right away. Hubbler, Appy Pie, ToolJet,…

Platform for full-stack financial servIndia.Groww became one of the most valuable fintech companies after raising $251 million in a round led by Tiger Global at a $3 billion valuation. Next Billion Technologies (NBT) operates Groww’s share broking and investment platform, which reported revenues of Rs 40.41 crore and a profit of Rs 2.73 crore. But there’s more: NBT is a subsidiary of Billionbrains Garage Ventures (BGV), which is a subsidiary of Groww Inc USA, the ultimate holding company. While financials for the US-based holding company are unavailable, we examined the…

Darwinbox, a human resources technology platform, has raised $72 million in a Series D round led by Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV), with participation from existing investors Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia India, Lightspeed India, Endiya Partners, 3One4Capital, JGDEV, and SCB 10X. DarwinBox received $15 million in a round led by Salesforce Ventures, the investment arm of the global customer relationship management giant Salesforce, a year ago. According to Darwinbox, the company’s valuation after this round will exceed $1 billion, bringing the total investment raised by the company to more than $110 million….