I am back with my favorite funding news of last week! I had shared my purpose in starting this weekly post, and I have received much positive feedback. Therefore, I was eager to dig into the top news from last week to share with you today. Last week was a stellar week for fundraising, with over $1 billion raised. There is some deviation in that number as YourStory claims that the total was $1.18 billion, while Inc42* claims that the total was $1.08 billion. However, both agree that over 90% of the money comes from the $1 billion round for Paytm announced through VSS’ twitter handle.

However, Paytm does not fall under the parameters of an early-stage start-up; therefore, within the early-stage funding news for the week, these were my favorite:

Tripeur.com - $1 million from SenseAI, Better Capital, Patni Wealth Advisors, Incubate and Rajul Garg and Alacrity India

What is Tripeur?

‍Tripeur is a cloud-based corporate travel expense management solution. They utilize AI/ML technology to reduce corporate travel expenditure by 30% (as claimed) with better reporting and productivity gains for the travel admin. They claim to have served over 50,000 business travelers and booked 1.4 lakh trips for them through their online platform.

‍What do I like Tripeur?

‍I have slowed down investing in travel over the past few years, but it still makes up almost 25% of my overall investment portfolio. We evaluate travel start-ups as it continues to be a significant investment theme for AVF. Within travel, I have found corporate travel to be the ripe space for disruption. I had identified corporate travel as the number 1 pain point to solve in my October 2017 post on the travel space. While I haven’t utilized the Tripeur platform yet (I sent them a demo request over the weekend). However, I can speak from experience that a decent corporate booking platform can expect a very sticky customer base. They must provide access to the best prices with easy booking and cancellation options along with accurate reporting for the finance team. These pain points are widely prevalent across all corporations, big or small. Therefore, people would readily refer customers to Tripeur if they can do what they promise, providing significant savings on CAC. Tripeur could find much value in associating with many of my portfolio companies - Confirmtkt, Repup, OYO, VistaRooms, and others.

FirstU.in – undisclosed round from India Quotient, FirstCheque and Farooq Adam

What is FirstU?

‍FirstU is an online platform that provides subscription-based periodic services for automobiles. Users buy monthly subscription plans and avail regular services such as vehicle inspection, repairs, washes, accident assistance, etc.

‍Why do I like FirstU?

‍Several start-ups attempted to solve the problems of the fractionalized vehicular maintenance space. Most of them tried to upgrade your neighborhood mechanic, but the cost of retraining and retaining them far outweighed the benefits provided to the revenue accounts. The few that have been attempting setting up a company or franchise-owned multi-brand workshops have done better, but even then, they continue to burn money.  Their LTV / CAC ratios are quite unfavorable as there is a long time gap between repeat services. Therefore, the start-up must resort to deep discounting to attract new or repeat customers. I have written about my love for subscription start-ups as they develop the habit of their customers paying them. Once they form this habit, it takes a massive effort for a newcomer to “break” the psychological pattern of paying the same company. It creates the ideal “sticky” customer relationship. It is precisely the spending relationship that I love to see my start-up get into with their customers. Once FirstU expands outside of Bangalore, I’d love to explore a B2B association between Everest Fleet and OneWay.Cab and them.

GreyAtom.com - $1.2 million from Montane Ventures, Pravega and Ritesh Arora

What does GreyAtom do?

‍GreyAtom provides a boot camp for learning data science and web development. The “students” work on real-world problems, get reviewed by their peers, which accelerates their learning curve. The claim to have upskilled over 35,000 learners with 87 percent making a career pivot of their choice.

‍Why do I like GreyAtom?

‍That working knowledge trumps the knowledge learned at a prestigious school is a known phenomenon. Therebefore the GreyAtom platform providing the workers of today the opportunity to upgrade and update their skills, but alongside their current roles is the need of the hour. GreyAtom creates a win-win for the individual and the corporate. For the upskilled individual, it means better prospects at their current employer or the ability to switch over to a new role for which they were previously unqualified. For a corporate, incentivizing their existing team members to upgrade their skills would reduce attrition, improve job satisfaction, and reducing hiring and training costs. There is a lot to like about GreyAtom! All I could wish for is that someone would come up with a similar platform to improve the skills for finance and marketing people. I’d be their first investor and a corporate customer for life!

‍*I am an investor in Inc42 through Artha India Ventures