Every Monday, I sit with my team to review the funding activity of the previous week. Then, I pick out a few companies that I would have loved to invest in or find founders doing similar things from that list. Here is my rationale behind this weekly exercise.
Last week 20 startups raised $740 million; that once again reassured that the demand for Indian startups remains strong and augurs well for a solid 2nd half of this calendar year.
This week, an overwhelming number of transactions were primarily reported in the early-stage category (compared to 18 last week), making my weekly analysis cut. After sifting through the news (aggregated from Tracxn, Inc42, and YourStory), I picked three as my favorite funding news from last week!
Name: Wherehouse
Amount Raised: Undisclosed amount from seed capital led by Better Capital Java Capital, Titan Capital, First Cheque, and Upsparks.
What does Wherehouse do?
Edited from Tracxn: Cloud-based on-demand warehousing solution and last-mile connectivity for D2C brands. The platform offers an end-to-end distributed fulfillment solution for brands. It enables users to predict inventory placement and optimize efficiency. Once the customer completes an online purchase, it picks, packs, and ships it using the proprietary WMS and a hybrid network of hyperlocal & 3PL partners. The system also allows personalized orders and updates information of the orders to customers.
Why do I like Wherehouse?
The D2C surge across India, coupled with the general advice from investors to move sales towards direct selling from brand websites, is creating an exciting market for micro-warehouses. Direct selling has several benefits for D2C founders, with the biggest one being the customer data that is otherwise siloed by Amazon, Flipkart, Natures Basket, or other retailers.
The key to a successful micro-warehousing startup is maximizing space utilization while reducing manual intervention. I have a personal investment in Caja Robotics that could of value to micro-warehousing startup founders!
Name: Flexmoney
Amount Raised: $4.8 million from Pravega Ventures, Z5 Capital, and individual investors.
What does Flexmoney do?
Edited from Tracxn: Flexmoney is an alternative lending startup enabling credit to consumers. Claims to enable trusted Banks and Lenders to easily offer lender-branded, instant "cardless" checkout finance across a Network of Merchant Points of Sale
Why do I like Flexmoney?
A critical factor in the US consumer boom was the availability of consumer credit. As the consumer ecosystem in India blooms, the availability of credit is a crucial factor in the sustenance of the promised growth. Many brands can offer credit but lack the infrastructure to do so. Several banking and non-banking companies want to offer consumer loans on the flip side but lack the technology depth to consummate the transactions.
Is Flexmoney that answer?
Name: SimpliContract
Amount Raised: $1.8 million from Kalaari Capital, Picus Capital, Arka Venture Labs, and Digital Sparrow Capital.
What does SimpliContract do?
Edited from Website: SimpliContract is a SaaS-based contract management platform covering the entire lifecycle from request to renewal and all types of contracts. Their mission is to democratize contracting and establish powerful contract management practices using the power of Artificial Intelligence (Natural Language Processing and Optical Character Recognition).
Why do I like SimpliContract?
The relief for Artha's legal team from this pandemic is the ease and acceptability of e-signing contracts. Many startups offer this service now, but these platforms must start thinking beyond the signing and storage services.
Businesses would expect platforms to utilize their position as document custodians to offer value-added services like contract renewal alerts, keyword searches via OCR, and data rooms for information sharing.
It seems like SimpliContract is, simply, doing just that!
