Sanjeev Bikhchandani and Indian Angel Network fund Kolkata-based Momo chain, writes Sonal Khetarpal WOW! Momo, a Kolkata-based branded momo chain, has raised over Rs 10 crore in its first round of funding from Naukri.com’s founder Sanjeev Bikhchandani and Indian Angel Network (IAN). Investors like Saurabh Srivastava, Ashvin Chadha, Ajai Chowdhry, Kris Gopalakrishnan, Raman Roy, Anand Ladsariya, amongst others also participated in the funding round. The company was valued at $10 million. Commerce graduates Sagar Daryani and Binod Kumar Homagai founded WOW! Momo in 2008 with an initial investment of Rs 30,000. They have grown the QSR chain to 50 outlets across six in India such as Kolkata, Bangalore, Pune, Chennai, and Kochi. The company will use the funds to expand its presence with 60 more stores across major cities in India out of which 30 will be based out of Delhi. They will be in high street locations, outlets in malls in areas such as Lajpat Nagar, Satya Niketan, Prashant Vihar, Kirti Nagar, Dwarka and Noida,” says Daryani. Last week, the company opened its new outlet in the tony Hauz Khas area of New Delhi. Some of their product innovations include Chocolate Momo, MoBurg, Sizzler Momo’s, Baked Momo Augratin etc. because of which their business model is being studied as a case study at various Multi National Organizations and B-Schools. “We closed FY2014-15 at a turnover of Rs 20 crores and have a monthly run rate of 2.7 crores,” informs Daryani, CEO of WOW! Momo. Sanjeev Bhikchandani IAN investor commented on the company’s growth strategy saying, “While you have access to multiple momo stalls across your locality, Wow! Momo as a brand promises great and consistent quality, while exciting taste buds with innovative Momo’s that have never been created tried before.”
Read More
Silicon Valley venture capitalist to focus on financial services, energy and farm sectors, reports K Chandra Mohan Silicon Valley venture capitalist and former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya is all set to invest $1 billion in Indian start-ups over the next 10 years. Recently, he invested $20 million into Indian mobile payments start-up Ezetap through his venture capital fund, The Social+Capital Partnership, the four-year-old VC firm that has backed companies like Box, Palantir and Slack. Later, Palihapitiya became chairman of the Ezetap board, the first for him in a portfolio company outside the US."We don't do board meetings Ezetap, because it can be done through mails. As a chairman, I prefer to review products, and build the right product and strategise the product road map, most importantly give them the benefit of my learning at Facebook," he said. Palihapitiya is looking to invest in businesses with products and solutions that target a billion plus people in the field of financial services, energy, power and agriculture. To understand the degree of the Indian market which is totally new to him, has partnered with Bengaluru based, seed-stage VC fund Prime Venture Partners (previously known as Angel Prime). Outside of Silicon Valley startups, Palihapitiya is more interested in investing in India. In India, the Social+Capital is introduced through Prime Venture Capital to Ezetap. The California based, The Social+Capital partnership has raised $ 1.2 billion in three rounds to date, and has already invested in 50 companies. Palihapitiya was instrumental in bringing Facebook's user base from 18 million to 1 billion. The Social+Capital VC hatch and spends in disruptive start-ups in the areas of healthcare, education, finance, mobile and enterprise software.
Read More
Ezetap Mobile Solutions, the Bangalore-based pioneer in mobile payments for emerging markets, announced on that is has raised Rs 150 crore in fresh funding. Ezetap’s current investors; Social+Capital, Helion Advisors, and Berggruen Holdings are joined by Horizons Ventures, the private investment arm for Li Ka-Shing, and the Capricorn Investment Group in this round. Social+Capital founder Chamath Palihapitiya will become Chairman of Board - the first time the former Facebook executive has taken on this role with a portfolio company outside the United States. Started in 2011 and launched in 2013, Ezetap has grown much faster than the rest of the industry, deploying over 60,000 new points of sale across India in under 30 months. Ezetap processes transactions worth over $1 million per day and has a customer base ranging from the most well known enterprises to tens of thousands of small retail businesses. While many enterprises, including some of the leading eCommerce, Insurance and mobile companies, have standardized on Ezetap and deployed its integrated solution, the company also sees huge potential in the smaller and medium business sector. Ezetap is already activating over 500 new small retail merchants a week and will use some of its funds to increase that by 5X in the next few months.Ezetap has partnerships with leading banks including Citibank, HDFC Bank, and American Express, who is also an investor in the company. Most recently, State Bank of India chose Ezetap to be its mPOS partner in order to help scale electronic payments and banking services to every corner of the country.
Read More
Funds to help Practo accelerate its march towards becoming a leading global digital healthcare platform Asia’s leading healthcare platform, Practo, on Thursday (6 August) announced that it has closed $90 million in Series C funding. This round was led by Tencent, with participation from marquee institutional investors including Sofina, Sequoia India, Google Capital, Altimeter Capital, Matrix Partners, Sequoia Capital Global Equities and Yuri Milner. This comes a few months after closing a $30 million Series B round from Sequoia India and Matrix Partners, bringing Practo’s total funds raised to $125 million - one of the largest in the world of Digital Health. Over the past six months, Practo has grown over 6 times to become one of the fastest growing healthcare platforms in the world with nearly 200,000 healthcare practitioners on it and over 10 million monthly searches by consumers looking to make the right healthcare choices. Over the next three to six months Practo will expand product lines and continue to look for potential acquisition of companies to encompass key healthcare segments and provide a seamless experience across medicine, wellness and fitness, globally. Practo will continue to add top notch talent to its world class team of 1,500 Practeons to continue to build the best products that will transform healthcare for consumers around the world. The footprint will expand from the current 35 Indian cities and three countries to over 100 Indian cities and 10 countries across South east Asia, Latin America, Middle East and Eastern Europe. “We are hard at work building a single health app that helps people live healthier by making better healthcare decisions for themselves and their loved ones. We are excited to partner with some of the best investors on the planet. Our global partners will give us the edge to continue building global healthcare products that our users love. Millions of users trust our platform every month and with our international expansion we aim to take Practo to billions of people globally” – Shashank ND, Founder & CEO, Practo. “We are very excited to partner with Practo as one of our first few investments in India. We look for ambitious, visionary Internet companies that are improving people’s lives at a global scale. Practo is a digital healthcare leader and one of the fastest growing healthcare companies in India. We look forward to working with the Practo team as the company transforms healthcare in India and international markets,” said Hongwei Chen, Senior Director of Investment and M&A at Tencent. "Sofina is proud to join Practo on its journey to transform the way stakeholders interact in the healthcare space, consistent with our strategy to be a long-term partner of world-class entrepreneurs and investors in growth markets." - Maxence Tombeur, Head of Asia at Sofina.
Read More
HomeLane.com had earlier raised $4.5 million as part of its Series A from Sequoia Capital and Aarin Capital. Vishal Krishna reportsThe online custom interior designing company HomeLane.com is scouting for $10 million, as part of its Series-B round, to expand operations across seven more cities in India. Currently it operates out of Chennai, Bangalore, Kochi, Hyderabad and Hyderabad. The money will be used in tying up with furniture factories across the country and creating a market for local interior designers. It's current run rate, in terms of revenues, for the financial year 2015-16 is expected to hit Rs 72 crore. It has already tied up with over 350 interior designers. There are 100,000 interior designers in India. "We are using technology such as virtual reality that creates immersive experiences through our product Kaleido lens to help interior designers win customers," says Srikanth Iyer, founder of HomeLane. He adds that the "real world" solution was to control the delivery ecosystem, which was the carpenters and electricians. "Designing is easy, we finish the projects within 45 days and it is our guarantee. The unorganised segment takes 3 months or more to deliver the interiors," says Srikanth. The furniture market is Rs 50,000 crore in size and only 2 per cent is organised. HomeLane.com had earlier raised $4.5 million as part of its Series A from Sequoia Capital and Aarin Capital. It was seed funded by K Ganesh, the serial entrepreneur who has also seed funded companies Bluestone.com and bigbasket.com.
Read More
The deal size is pegged at $3 million but could not be verified, writes Paramita Chatterjee Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani is in advanced talks to invest in a two-year-old Bangalore-based start-up Mubble Networks Private Ltd, in his personal capacity, signaling a strong vote of confidence in the new breed of India's entrepreneurs. Talks are at an advanced stage and the deal is expected to close over the next few days, a person with direct knowledge of the development told BW. Mubble is a mobile first, India centric product in the telecom utility apps space. It is the first app in the world which automatically maintains a live prepaid bill for its users. The company was founded by three IIT engineer friends who have a strong background in marketing, analytics and mobile technology platforms. The Mubble app supports Indian operators across the country and is built for dual SIM phones. It works offline and what’s more, it is also available in all Indian languages – a true ‘made for India’ app! When contacted, Ashwin Ramaswamy, Co-Founder & CEO at Mubble Networks declined to divulge any details pertaining to the transaction. “Thank you for writing to us. We are in advanced stages of talks with various investors, and therefore, I am sorry that I will not be able to answer any of your questions for now,” he said over an email response. Nilekani, however, declined to comment on the story. Another person, an industry executive, pegged the deal size at $3 million. However, this could not be independently verified. The funds that the company is raising will help Mubble recruit talent. Currently the company has 12 employees including the 3 owners. So far, 2015 seems to be the year of startups with young entrepreneurs increasingly churning out winning ideas and attracting huge dollars in funding. In fact, investing in emerging businesses has opened up new entrepreneurial avenues for India Inc's head honchos as well who are now parking their personal wealth in startups. “While for startups, having senior executives on board obviously helps in gaining knowledge and strategic input, for industrialists and corporate honchos it gives an opportunity to bolster entrepreneurship,” said Raja Lahiri, partner at advisory firm Grant Thornton. Recently, Ratan Tata, chairman emeritus of Tata Sons, invested in taxi firm Ola in his personal capacity, while Nilekani was in news for his Rs 100 crore investment along with billionaire investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala in an entity that owns Café Coffee Day. Also, in the risk capital market, there is growing chatter that venture market is the place to watch out for. In the first half of the current calendar year, as many as 363 venture capital deals were sealed, three times more than the number of private equity deals, which stood at 99, as per data available with Grant Thornton.
Read More
Ventureast is perhaps the oldest fund house in India. It has been around since the mid-nineties, and is in its fourth stage of funding Indian entrepreneurs. They have made a Rs 550-crore bet on Life Sciences and is in the process of pumping in another Rs 600 crore in the sector. The remaining Rs 1600 crore of the fund’s corpus has gone into investments in technology, distribution, agriculture and infrastructure companies. The fund is also betting on clean environment. It has invested in interesting ideas such as Central Parking Services (CPS), a tech enabled parking management company, 24LetterMantra, an organic food company, and Bharat Light and Power, a solar infrastructure management company. Sarath Naru, the Managing Partner of Ventureast, says in an interview with BW|Businessworld's Vishal Krishna the risk taking abilities of Indian entrepreneurs have gone up significantly because of the availability of seed capital. However, Sarath believes that Indian entrepreneurs need to build technology businesses that could solve problems related to consumption; such as connecting hyper local retailers to the supply chain and to the factories with a consumer play. Amidst the investment buzz in India, Sarath believes, the general rule of investing in ideas remains, which he means that only a third of the portfolio companies would become extremely successful companies. Ventureast has until now invested in over 80 companies.Here are the excerpts of the interview. What is the current idea behind investing?Seeing the current state of affairs in the e-tail sector, let me quote from Guy Kawaski. It goes back to the previous internet bubble in 2001. His comment was that "I am praying every day for the next bubble to come because I know now what I am going to do". We have seen bubbles and the entrepreneur in us wants to cut it fine because we do not want to miss out on the opportunity. It’s a repeat of the previous peak and we can be talk about winners and losers. In the end of the day the question remains have people created value? That is the way we look at it. By and large we are always moving forward with value creation. There will be transfer of wealth. From a strategy perspective, how do we look at it? We constantly track companies and we are trying to find the best companies before the foreign funds back a startup. There are businesses which will be generic businesses and market places. Market places will be very difficult to build because of the generic nature of the business. The one with the muscle will win. Its winner takes all market. Market share is not the only variable to success. There are good lessons and bad lessons. Many entrepreneurs can raise Series A and get stuck after that. These guys have to restart their lives. It is the nature of the game that they have got in to. What is the new internet business?Businesses that need capital are generic and on a horizontal platform. It is like land grab. Here the entrepreneur is taking a huge risk. The early investors need to take that risk and have to ask themselves if they have the ability to convince large funds to take a bet on their company. We take small bets. Our thesis is that we need to look at companies that have a lifetime for profitability. The next set of businesses is integrated to the real world, where we see they have competitive advantage in product delivery. A combination of real world and the internet is all we are seeing. You need something more than capital in these business cases. Ventureast is looking at B2B, B2B2C. Full stack businesses that look at real world integration. India is a cash economy and companies need to solve this problem of accepting payments in cash. We must use the internet to scale, but the delivery is a real world problem that companies must solve this. One needs to control the experience. The furniture etailers is something that needs a full stack. If someone can solve the experience then it makes great sense to invest in these customers. Can they customise furniture? This is the real world problem that can be solved. It can be solved by working with designers and manufacturers. Now is the time for such businesses. What kind of businesses that use technology can add value in India?The handyman market is there. About eight years ago we worked with ProHandyman, the entrepreneur had a brilliant customer acquisition model, he had a door to door model of selling where he would tie in with Croma and gets a contract to service consumers. The entrepreneur’s problem was with execution of getting the plumber or a carpenter to the home on time. It was a hub and spoke model in Bangalore and Chennai. At least now the acquisition problem is solved and we need to crack the service part. Handyman service is very protocol driven and technology should track every activity and process. There are consumer services which technology can solve. Take for example Portea, about a third of the consumers need nursing and physiotherapy. The delivery has been done with smartphones. Solving the technology part is easier; it is the cultural part that is difficult. Can these individuals who are professional nurses make it on time to the destination of the consumers and follow processes. Again we come back to the real world delivery problems. We are looking at a company that allows patients to connect with doctors for surgeries. Hospitals have changed their mode of operations, they are providing infrastructure only. The doctors have to pull patients today. If technology can play a role here then it is a good business to look at. We would like to seed such a company, about $1.5 million is going in. Hospitals have built too much capacity and they need to utilise it. These internet companies can help these hospitals get more patients for surgeries. A patient’s family spends more on the first two days of the surgery and the hospitals want to bring the average length of stay down to increase revenues. Portea has signed up with Manipal to continue monitoring the patient after surgeries. The company makes sure that the person goes home at the right time. The insurance companies are happy because it is data and are happy that people are cared at home rather than a hospital. We had several telemedicine companies in the past and not many came through. The hand-held phone has changed the way you can do diagnostics. The device play is meant for specificity and accuracy of data being collected. Scanning pictures and sending it from remote areas. There is a point of care solution for the company that we have invested in. It is an exciting company. What about skill development as a business?The biggest challenge is no one gives value for certificates. Imagine you getting paid the same salary even after having a qualification, although you have better skills. This is difficult to solve because the companies that employ such individuals need to set a clear path for these individuals. The first wave of course was BPOs and call centres. We skilled so many people and there was too much supply. I think education is a space we still have not found a company that makes a different. But there is a lot of interest from entrepreneurs who want to give back to society in terms of skill development. India will continue to have opportunities for disintermediation, can we make people self employed by using technology and finance. There is also a case for startups that are getting in to financing of small businesses in rural regions. This is a service that can use information and services. What about manufacturing, design and retail services?Make in India has two or three elements to it. India cannot compete with China in scale, investors cannot get into companies that are playing the price game and we need to find companies that can be unique in intellectual property. Clearly we have missed the bus in manufacturing. However, Ventureast is betting on design services and have a portfolio company. In retail there is a play for entrepreneurs in build cloud based services to connect FMCG and Kiranas or small stores. We have already met such a company. The ideas that are coming to the table today are certainly better. Life Sciences is an industry that we will bet on going forward.
Read More
An educational technology start-up, founded by three Indians and a German student in a US university, has received a whopping $100,000 funding from a private investor. CampusKnot, the online educational hub founded by three Indian students Rahul Gopal, Hiten Patel and Perceus Mody, and German student Katja Walter at Mississippi State University, has been designed to increase collaboration among faculty and students. The $100,000 funding by an unnamed investor from the Gulf Coast, has set a record for private investment in a student-run start-up at the MSU, Clarion-Ledger newspaper reported. Free to users, the site is a clearinghouse for schedules, assignments and other academic events. It also offers a marketplace for textbooks, including a feature making them searchable by title, subject and author's name. CampusKnot debuted in 2013. Since then, creators spent two years refining their project at MSU's Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the College of Business. Gopal and his co-founders hope that the CampusKnot eventually will serve as a single site for students to easily reach teachers and classmates, residence halls and student organisations -- plus offer space for faculty to post course syllabi and related academic material. The completed site would also allow students to access automated calendars based on their network groups. Gopal is a senior aerospace engineering major while Patel graduated from MSU in 2013 with a degree in information systems and is pursuing a second degree in marketing. Mody is a senior majoring in medical technology while Walter graduated in May with a degree in art and graphic design. Though still in a testing phase, the company currently is recruiting student leaders and faculty members to form focus groups for a soft launch of the site this fall. "We are not looking to have a job; we are looking at creating jobs and helping to solve educational problems," Patel said.
Read More
