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 29 startups raised $209 million; the base of 25+ deals a week is firmly set now, and the Zomato & PayTM IPOs led-liquidity could open the flood gates for funding in early-stage companies. Stay tuned; the best is yet to come!
This week, an overwhelming number of deals were in the early-stage rounds (compared to 22 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: Ati Motors
Amount Raised: $3.5M from Blume Ventures, Exfinity Venture Partners, MFV Partners and a syndicate on LetsVenture.
What does Ati Motors do?
Edited from Tracxn: Ati Motors is developing an autonomous electric cargo vehicle. The company produces "Sherpa Tug" autonomous, electric tug with features like 1-ton payload capacity, electro-mechanical braking, lithium Ion battery, OTA software updates, etc.
Why do I like Ati Motors?
Warehousing is fast becoming the mainstay of the internet commerce industry, and anything that increases efficiency, productivity, and accuracy can provide colossal cost & margin implications. Ati is doing precisely that with their autonomous robot (I love the name Sherpa!)
Name: Arcana
Amount Raised: $375K from Balaji Srinivasan, Sandeep Nailwal, JD Kanani, Kendrick Nguyen, and angels.
What does Arcana do?
Edited from Yourstory: Founded in 2019, Arcana Network aims to be the developer-friendly decentralized storage option amongst other storage platforms such as IPFS, Filecoin, Storj, Sia, etc.. It gives developers the capability to build more secure and privacy-preserving applications from the ground up. Through Arcana's SDK, developers and businesses can protect the private, confidential, and sensitive information of their customers, employees, and business easily. The firm's privacy stack offers decentralized services for identity and access management, end-to-end encryption, non-custodial key management, and data storage.
Why do I like Arcana?
User data privacy is an issue that confounds even the most well-funded and seemingly secure tech startups. The obvious incentive for hackers has been the silos of datasets to grab if they can break through any of the gaps created by layers of security.
They say that blockchain is the future of the internet.
So can one protect user data using blockchain? Arcana has that answer!
Name: Bikry
Amount Raised: $1.3 million from YCombinator, founders of Twitch.TV, Razorpay, Angelist, Cabra VC, and angels.
What does Bikry do?
Edited from Tracxn: App-based storefront solutions for social commerce business. The app enables users to open online stores, create product catalogs on the phone, and share it with customers through Whatsapp Business, Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram, etc., review store performance, order management, scheduling & tracking deliveries in real-time. The mobile application is available for Andriod users.
Why do I like Bikry?
Where the customers are, the sellers will go. Therefore if the customers are online, the sellers offline or otherwise have to go there too.
However, it is not easy to make a simple-looking website that possesses the functionality your customers seek. Therefore Bikry's solution has millions of business owners across India right now – and in the future!
