Mumbai-based crowdfunding platform for social, personal and creative projects, Ketto has raised $700,000 in funding led by Pradyumna Dalmia, deal champion of Calcutta Angels and Sudhir Rao, deal champion of The Chennai Angels & co-founder of IndusAge Partners.The other investors in the round includes - Singapore angel network, Anupam Mittal, Indian Internet Fund, Letsventure, Chennai Angels, Calcutta Angels, Intellecap Impact Investment Network (I3N), Ah Ventures, & Project Guerrilla. With the infused funds, the startup plans to double its technology and business development team with an aim to reach $100m in volumes via crowdfunding. Ketto also plans to expand operations in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and other South-East Asian countries.Varun Sheth, Co-founder & CEO, Ketto said, “The fresh round of funds will be used to build a world class platform which will facilitate users to raise funds across multiple categories for any project of their choice.”With global crowdfunding market estimated to reach $96 billion by 2025 and Asia being the key growth driver, Ketto is uniquely positioned to amass maximum support for any projects – be it disaster, social, technology, creative or personal.Sudhir Rao, the Chennai Angels and co-founder of IndusAge Partners said, “It is creating a platform where everyone has an equal chance to raise funds for any project: be it social or commercial.”Founded in October, 2012 by Varun Sheth, Bollywood actor Kunal Kapoor and Zaheer Adenwala, Ketto is Asia’s largest crowdfunding platform for social, personal and creative projects in Asia according to crowdsurfer.com. The company has witnessed a growth of 3000% year-on-year basis in terms of volumes, and in the past few months, has been crowdfunding close to a crore monthlyIn the last 12 months, multiple celebrities & corporates have backed various projects by raising funds on Ketto, The list includes names like - Hritik Roshan, Amitabh Bachchan, Anuskha Sharma, Myntra, StarSports, among others. Recently, Ketto has created first-of-its-kind partnership with Lakme Fashion Week - to provide a platform to the seven Gen Next designers to garner funds to launch their label at the upcoming showcase in August, 2015 in Mumbai.(BW Online Bureau)
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The Small Industries Development Bank of India (Sidbi) signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Snapdeal, an e-commerce major in India, to provide financial support to its MSME vendors. The MoU was signed by Dr Kshatrapati Shivaji, CMD, Sidbi and Kunal Bahl, CEO, Snapdeal on July 14, 2015 at Sidbi office in Mumbai.E-commerce is the buzz word in the global as well as domestic market. The MSMEs find e-commerce platforms like Snapdeal as a promising ground for increasing their business opportunities. The e-commerce sector in India has become four times its size, from $3.8 billion in 2009 to $17 billion in 2014, growing at a CAGR of 37 per cent. The sector is expected to cross the $100 billion mark within the next five years, contributing over 4% to India’s GDP.Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI), set up under an Act of Parliament, has been consistently promoting, financing and developing the Micro, Small & Medium Enterprise (MSME) sector since its inception on April 02, 1990. SIDBI continued its business model aimed at addressing the financial and non-financial gaps in the MSME eco-system. Some niche financial gaps addressed by the Bank are equity / risk capital, receivable finance, sustainable finance which includes energy efficiency (EE)/ clean production (CP) technology and services sector financing.Over the years, Sidbi has pioneered a number of innovative financial products and set up new institutions to cater to the diverse credit and non-credit needs of MSMEs. In its efforts to include larger number of MSMEs in its fold, Sidbi tied up with a number of intermediaries to increase its outreach. MoU with e-commerce giant ‘Snapdeal’ is one such effort in this direction.The innovative financial products are growth capital / risk capital, receivable financing / reverse factoring, energy efficiency financing, micro finance etc. Snapdeal promoted by Kunal Bahl along with Rohit Bansal, is one of the India’s most impactful digital commerce ecosystem, that creates life changing experiences for buyers and sellers. In its journey till now, Snapdeal has partnered with several global investors and individuals such as Softbank, Blackrock, Temasek and eBay Inc., Premji Invest, Intel Capital, Ratan Tata, etcFor addressing the problem of lack of required financial assistance, Sidbi and Snapdeal have joined hands to enable latter’s MSME vendors to scale up their online business through financial support from Sidbi.
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Funding to be deployed for multi-city expansion and brand management activitiesBoxMySpace, a Mumbai-based unique storage solution provider which uses technology to enable clutter free homes and office spaces, has raised Rs 1.92 crore from a consortium of investors led by Farooq Oomerbhoy, who was one of the co-founders of the early stage fund Orios Venture Partners. Ritesh Veera and Singapore Angel Networks also participated in the funding round.The funding will be deployed for expanding operations in metros including Pune, Bangalore and Delhi and undertaking key marketing efforts. BoxMySpace also plans to launch other innovative storage solutions in the future and partner with online retailers and SMEs to streamline their need for an efficient storage solution for their goods.Established in January 2015 by Pratyush Jalan, BoxMySpace was formed with an aim to bring the same convenience of cloud storage to the physical goods of a consumer’s home. The consumer can effortlessly avail on-demand storage service for their household goods at their doorstep either through the web or mobile application across Android and iOS platforms for monthly fee starting at Rs 99. BoxMySpace delivers high quality storage boxes to customer’s homes/offices wherein they can pack their belongings in the boxes, thereafter BoxMySpace collects it and stores it safely for them! It also provides spaces for larger storage items through it’s 4x4 and 6x6 packages. BoxMySpace leverages the unused spaces in large warehouses and plugs the gap to provide a technology backed solution to retail customers. It also provides the consumer with their storage dashboard to create a visual catalog of all their stored items and a unique code to each item/box to enable recall within 12 to 24 hours.Commenting on the investment, Farooq A Oomerbhoy, said “We are delighted to partner with BoxMySpace which is poised to lead the innovation forray within the storage industry in India. Shrinking living spaces, dynamic work patterns have resulted in people adopting a transient way of life, necessitating the need for storage solutions. Certain problems which plague consumers but do not consciously warrant attention unless a solution is bought forward for them, (for eg Ola/Uber) and BmS is one of them. Once consumers realise storage is no longer a hassle and expensive, BmS will become their preferred choice. We are working closely with BmS to introduce this solution to not only Indian consumer, but given the scalable nature of the business will be looking to expand in other part of Asia very soon. ”
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The flavour seems to have returned to lending capital to small and medium businesses. Ten years ago private banks like ICICI and HDFC Bank increased their retail lending. In less than two years the global crisis, along with increased defaults in the Indian small business industry, compelled the banks to rein in their lending to the small businesses. Most of the loans, in the early 2009, ended up recovering only 75 per cent of the the total loan value.
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Puneet Dalmia, MD, Dalmia Bharat seeds Rs 50 crore in an one month old Delhi based reality startup targeting Delhi’s Rs 13,000-crore, contractor-built one-off home market, reports BW Online BureauDalmia Bharat Group's MD Puneet Dalmia has invested Rs 50 crore in a realty start-up, Prithu, in his individual capacity. With this, Dalmia holds 74 percent in Prithu, which caters to the individual home segment. The balance will be held by Prithu's MD Nitin Bansal.Prithu, which supplies to the individual home segment is founded by a young team of IIM and IIT alumni, seeks to disrupt the fragmented contractor- driven individual home segment in Delhi. Over the next five years, Prithu is eyeing an annual turnover of over Rs 500 crore.“Delhi’s residential stand-alone real estate market is much like the rest of India where one-off homes built by small contractors are the preferred choice. Low degree of professionalism has led to a serious trust deficit in this sector, and home owners often have disappointing stories to narrate regarding on time delivery and quality of specs” mentioned Dalmia. Prithu-built homes would include built-in safety and security features, and will cost between Rs 2,300 to Rs 6,000 per sq ft, covering all design, construction and approvals costs. The homes would also be GRIHA (Green Rating for Integrated Habitat Assessment) certified. “We’re looking to transform the small-contractor-dominated individual or one-off home segment with a systematic and transparent approach, to ensure a superior and satisfying customer experience,” said Nitin Bansal, Co-founder and Managing Director, Prithu.
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A video analytics start-up, Vidooly on Monday (13 July) announced the opening of its new office in Noida which embraces an open design to foster collaboration and innovation, will also support Vidooly’s aggressive hiring plans to double its workforce in the next six months. It is looking to hire data scientists and analysts and programmers to boost its team strength. Vidooly recently received funding from Silicon Valley based investor, Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP).Subrat Kar, CEO & Co-founder of Vidooly, said, “Vidooly’s talent pool is largely of young people. To keep energy levels high, our focus is on creating the right culture, which is an environment for creativity where there is collaboration, a free flow of ideas as well as fun, humor and spontaneity. Our physical office space is designed to reflect this culture we wish to create and an expression of who we are as a company.”Vidooly’s new office will allow it to scale up its workforce as it gears up to respond to the high demand for its product and services and support its expansion plans beyond India. Vidooly’s new office is an expression of its company identity through physical space. Done up in the colors of its corporate identity, red, white and black, the design is open with no private cubicles and the café within the office, features a large television screen.“With expansion plans afoot to focus on the Middle East and South-East Asia because of the growing content consumption in these regions, we are looking to hire aggressively and add 25 more people to our team in the near term. We are looking for data scientists and analysts and programmers who can support our core product development”, he added.Vidooly’s growth is a result of the global megatrend being witnessed in video consumption, which comprises an estimated more than 60 per cent of all data traffic on the Web. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, next only to Google. More than 300 hours of video is being uploaded on YouTube every minute, out of which 90 per cent of the videos generate less than 10,000 views in the first one-month. Currently, content creators are putting a lot of efforts to create good quality content, but the problem is that they find it difficult in targeting the right kind of audience to watch their content. This is where Vidooly steps in to help content creators, brands and multi channel networks (MCNs), to maximize their YouTube organic views, build an audience base and earn more revenues on YouTube.
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This is the third round of funding for Grofers which has already raised over $45 million, writes Paramita ChatterjeeA clutch of early-stage investment firms -- Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global and Apoletto Asia -- have infused $36 million dollar in Grofers, an online grocery delivery service, founded by Saurabh Kumar and Albinder Dhindsa in Delhi NCR in late 2013.Today, in less than two years, Grofers is present in over 10 cities including Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Jaipur and Pune apart from the metros.While an email sent to a Grofers executive did not elicit any response, a person familiar with the transaction said the funds raised will help facilitate the Gurgaon-based start-up’s expansion plans. “Going forward, Grofers plans to expand its operations in other geographies and penetrate deeper in groceries and add new consumables categories,” the person added. Daily grocery, bakery items, flowers, fruits & vegetables, meats and baby care products, are among the products that are currently available on Grofers. It is understood that corporate law firm Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co. acted for Grofers.So far, Grofers has partnered with over 400 vendors in Bangalore, Delhi NCR and Mumbaie. This is the third round of funding for the company. The company has already raised over $45 million in two earlier rounds. However, the quantum of stake that the investors picked up could not be ascertained.The funding in Grofers highlights how investors are increasingly betting big on Indian entrepreneurs and their winning ideas. Earlier this year, Gurgaon-based ShopClues raised $100 million from Tiger Global, Helion Venture Partners and Nexus Venture Partners, while Rocket Internet AG along with other investors infused $110 million in global food delivery marketplace Foodpanda.While start-ups in themselves seem to be the current hot favourites of private equity and venture capital investors, it is the online shopping market space that they are betting big on. "Today, the contours of PE/VC investments in the country have changed in India, with investors eyeing a lot more new age, consumer oriented companies for investments,” said Avnish Bajaj, co-founder and managing director of Matrix India, which recently infused less than $7 million in two starts ups, Treebo Hotels - a new age, tech-enabled chain of hotels -and Bangalore based recruitment startup Belong.
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Housing.com is moving on from the Rahul Yadav controversy. The real estate portal has named chief operating officer Rishabh Gupta as interim chief executive, a week after co-founder and former CEO Rahul Yadav was fired for bad behaviour.His appointment is effective immediately, Jonathan Bullock, SoftBank's representative on Housing's board, said in an internal email titled 'Moving forward & Looking up'. SoftBank is the largest stakeholder in the company. Economictimes.com reported that Bullock said in a email sent to Housing employees said: "We believe and expect that his principled leadership, tenacity, and determination will position us well."Gupta, a former Flipkart employee, had been effectively running Housing during the past few months of turmoil in the company because of Yadav's run-ins with investors and others. Gupta, Housing's first angel investor Haresh Chawla, and chief technical officer Abhishek Anand will also join an operating committee.The Housing board had fired Yadav as CEO last week, bringing to an end a tumultuous relationship at one of India's most-watched startups. Housing.com was in news again on Monday (6 July) and again for wrong reasons. The site was down for sometime after being hacked and the twitter world was aflame with rumours about who had done it. Many had pointed a finger at Rahul Yadav who had denied the allegation.Housing was founded in 2012 by a dozen college-mates from IIT-Mumbai. Four of them including Yadav now have left the company.The company is currently controlled by SoftBank, which has a 32 per cent stake in Housing. The Japanese firm has formed an executive committee that controls Housing's finances and operations, and is led by Bullock, who recently replaced SoftBank's president Nikesh Arora on the Housing board. Investor Nexus venture owns about 19 per cent stake in Housing, and Helion Ventures and Falcon Edge about 10 per cent each.There are rumours going on that Quikr’s investors have agreed to buy Housing.com for $170 million, much less than the $235 million valuation that the company garnered in 2014.
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