Jan 20, 2022 | Business, Finance, Startup
- Indian D2C food brand and shark tank contestant – Jhaji Store has raised an undisclosed amount from Velocity.in, India’s largest revenue-based financier
- Based out of Darbhanga district in Bihar, Jhaji is a women-led enterprise that plans on leveraging the capital to grow their business exponentially
- Velocity.in leverages online data to offer non-dilutive, collateral-free growth capital within a week.
Direct-to-consumer (D2C) brand Jhaji Store, an online pickle store that sells authentic homemade achars, has raised an undisclosed amount from Velocity.in, India’s largest revenue-based financier. This is the first round of external financing Jhaji Store has raised. Founded in March 2021 by the sister-in-law duo – Kalpana and Uma, Jhaji Store is a women-led D2C startup that sells traditional homemade pickles from the Darbhanga district in Bihar through their eCommerce store. Jhaji Store offers over 15 different varieties of traditional homemade pickles free from artificial colors, preservatives, and other synthetic chemicals all made locally.
“People in Mithila have traditionally enjoyed pickles since forever. Some flavors and ingredients are unique in this area. Over the last 30 years, my sister-in-law and I have been making and sending these pickles to friends and family everywhere from New Delhi to New York. ” said Kalpana, Co-founder Jhaji Store. “Therefore, in October 2020, Uma and I started the Jhaji store to celebrate Mithila’s authentic taste and its food culture all around the country and the world. Jhaji Store’s unique Mithila pickles were an instant hit among their consumers, and they sold to over 2,500 customers within the first four months of starting the company. Inspired by their initial success, Kalpana and Uma also participated in Shark Tank India to raise capital for expanding their business.
They asked Rs. 50 lakhs in exchange for 10% equity in the business, but none of the sharks were interested.. This is when Velocity – India’s largest revenue-based financier approached Jhaji to offer growth capital. Talking about the financing, Uma said, “We are extremely excited to raise capital from Velocity. The team reached out the next day after our Shark Tank pitch aired on Sony TV, and was quick to give us an indicative offer on the same day. The terms were simple enough for Kalpana and I to understand, and as a result, we finalized them within 5 days. We’re glad to find the capital that will fund the next part of our journey, without diluting any equity. “Since the show has aired, it’s been an almost magical experience. There has been a massive surge in demand for our pickles from all over India. The money we’ve raised from Velocity will help us fulfill orders and free up the money we can invest in launching new product lines and ramping up production.” she added.
JhaJi Store is an honest and conscious business that employs underprivileged women and men, who have seen their family income triple in the few months they have been working with JhaJi. The business also spends 2% of its revenues directly towards the cause of girl child education. As per a recent study by YourStory, less than 6% of Venture Capital funding goes to startups with women co-founders. Through its objective, data-backed approach, Velocity aims to eliminate this bias from investing. Velocity already funds more than 5x women-led startups than Venture Capital.
Speaking about the round of financing, Abhiroop Medhekar, Co-founder & CEO of Velocity, said, “We were impressed with the clarity of purpose and determination which Kalpana Ji and Uma Ji have showcased in their entrepreneurial journey so far. We started Velocity with a firm belief that it shouldn’t be so hard for good business to get funded. Velocity strives to democratise access to capital for all founders, regardless of their educational pedigree or geographical location. We make financing decisions purely based on the veracity of the business model as evidenced by a business’s online data.”
Velocity.in, a Bengaluru-based fintech, is India’s largest revenue-based financier. Over 1,500 e-commerce businesses have signed up with Velocity since it commenced operations in early 2020. With over Rs 1,200 crore of fundable revenues connected to Velocity’s platform, the fintech has already processed 350 investments across 250 companies.
About Velocity: Velocity was launched in early 2020 by IIT Bombay graduates Abhiroop Medhekar, Atul Khichariya and Saurav Swaroop. The founding team has a strong background in India’s financial services and tech startup ecosystem. They previously worked in companies like Elevation Capital (earlier SAIF Partners), McKinsey, Acko Insurance, and HackerRank. Velocity is their second tryst with entrepreneurship. The trio had earlier worked together at Taskbob, a managed marketplace for high-quality home services.
For more information, please visit: https://www.velocity.in
About JhaJi Store:
Founded in March 2021 by sister-in-law duo Kalpana Jha and Uma Jha, the JhaJi store is an online direct-to-consumer food brand that sells traditional, homemade pickles and chutneys from Mithilanchal, Bihar. They offer 15 different varieties of organically made pickles free from artificial colours, preservatives and other synthetic chemicals.
Jan 20, 2022 | Business, Startup
Shipsy Wins National Startup India Award 2021 in The Enterprise Systems Sector for Logistics Management
Shipsy’s smart logistics management platform empowers global businesses to optimize, automate, track, and simplify end-to-end supply chain operations. Founded in 2015 in Gurugram, the company leverages AI and big data to design and develop low-code SaaS solutions to improve operational efficiency across industries. The brand has recently set its regional headquarters in Dubai. Last year the company raised $6M in Series A round led by Sequoia Capital India’s Surge and existing investor Info Edge.
India’s leading smart logistics management platform provider, Shipsy, has bagged the National Startup Award 2021 in the Enterprise Software sector for Logistics Management. The platform empowers enterprises to optimize, automate, track and simplify end-to-end logistics and supply chain operations and drive sustainability. A flagship initiative by the Government of India’s Startup India, the award recognizes and rewards startups contributing to India’s economic growth through innovations that revolutionize their respective sectors and inject competition. It invites applications from startups focusing on products/solutions with high potential of employment and wealth creation with measurable social impact. The Ministry evaluated 2177 applications across 49 sub-sectors on innovation, scalability, economic impact, social impact, environmental impact, and inclusiveness and diversity.
“It was a proud moment for the whole Shipsy team to win the National Startup Award 2021. Since Shipsy’s inception, our journey has been about inspiration, excellence, people and customer success. The need to efficiently manage the skyrocketing demand for cross-border logistics, ensure seamless on-demand deliveries, fulfill evolving customer expectations and optimize costs will drive businesses to leverage smart logistics management solutions powered by AI, ML, predictive analytics, IoT and more. This, in turn, will create fantastic employment and learning opportunities for our youth. To make logistics operations sustainable, our technology is helping businesses across the globe reduce carbon footprint by curbing distance traveled by 5% and decreasing trip volumes by 6%,” says Soham Chokshi, Co-Founder and CEO of Shipsy. The National Startup Awards serves as an ideal platform for showcasing businesses that create opportunities for the nation, including employment, income, and social development, thereby encouraging entrepreneurship.
Shipsy is clocking a growth rate of 2.5x and has increased its people strength by 75% in 2021. Shipsy strengthened its foothold in the Middle East by establishing regional headquarters in Dubai last year. This development took its team size to 200+ people operating in a completely remote environment.
About Shipsy
Shipsy’s smart logistics management platform empowers global businesses to optimize, automate, track, and simplify end-to-end supply chain operations. Founded in 2015 in Gurugram, the company leverages AI and big data to design and develop low-code SaaS solutions to improve operational efficiency across industries. The brand has recently set its regional headquarters in Dubai. Last year the company raised $6M in Series A round led by Sequoia Capital India’s Surge and existing investor Info Edge.
Dec 25, 2021 | Business, Startup
Perfora, a digital-first and design-led oral care brand, has raised a $260,000 Pre-Seed round led by Sauce.vc, a venture capital fund that backs early-stage consumer brands. Huddle, India’s leading accelerator and early-stage fund for disruptive start-ups founded by Sanil Sachar and Ishaan Khosla also took part in the round. Other investors who backed the company in this round include entrepreneurs Bala Sarda (Founder & CEO, Vahdam Teas), Sameer Mehta (Co-founder, Boat Lifestyle) and Shashank Mehta (Founder, The Whole Truth Foods).
The capital raised will be utilised by Perfora to expand into new product categories, test out different channels, build our team and establish product-market fit. Perfora is a digital-first brand that plans to disrupt the oral care category with its well-designed, functional, and innovative products. The company has introduced India’s best-designed Electric Toothbrush, a.k.a ‘Truthbrush’ in four colours, India’s first Probiotic Mouthwash in two variants and a Smart Flosser in black gold colour. Perfora aims to elevate the everyday oral care experience for consumers.
The Gurugram-based company was founded by entrepreneurs Jatan Bawa (erstwhile Head of Product Strategy at Vahdam India) and Tushar Khurana (formerly part of the Business Expansion team at Cult.fit), who have known each other for about half a decade. “We are extremely fortunate to have Sauce.vc and Huddle Team supporting and mentoring us as we go about building a different kind of oral care brand. It is relatively easier to find investors who can provide you only capital, however very difficult to find people who are willing to put their time, money, and faith in helping build a brand. We’re glad to have unparalleled support from our investors who believe in our vision and execution capabilities”, said Jatan Bawa, Co-Founder, Perfora.
“Perfora is looking at the oral care category with a different lens with extremely well designed products, lifestyle-led communication and a very strong focus on delivering functionality. Oral care is a $2 billion category in India that is ready to be disrupted with a digital-first brand. We are thrilled and excited to be an early partner in the journey of building a new-age oral care brand,” said Manu Chandra, Managing Partner, Sauce.vc.
Speaking on their investment in the company, Ishaan Khosla, Founding Partner at Huddle, said, “We have been interacting with Jatan and Tushar since their conceptualisation phase of building a global D2C-first oral care brand from India. Since day one, we have appreciated their attention to detail to deliver a high-quality customer experience while ensuring a laser-sharp focus on performance. Oral care in India is a segment waiting to be disrupted and given Perfora’s approach to the market, we are excited for the next phase of building alongside the team.”
Perfora is the only brand in the country that offers an option to personalise electric toothbrushes (with name printed on it). The company is working to introduce a holistic portfolio of oral care products, including morning and night toothpaste, alcohol-free mouthwash, besides other offerings. By 2023, Perfora aims to achieve an annual revenue rate of $1 million.
Unlike other consumer brands, the company launched a pre-order campaign earlier this year, where a limited number of units of electric toothbrushes were available to buy directly from their website perforacare.com. Perfora’s products are also available on platforms like Amazon India, Flipkart, CRED and soon on Nykaa and Big Basket as well.
Dec 25, 2021 | Startup, Tech
Unbox Robotics, a leading supply chain robotics technology company, raised $7 million in a Series-A round led by 3one4 Capital with participation from Sixth Sense Ventures and Redstart Labs (Info Edge). The round also saw participation from Unbox Robotics’ founders Pramod Ghadge, Shahid Memon and its CPO Rohit Pitale, alongside its existing investors – US-based venture capital firm SOSV, Arali Ventures, WEH Ventures, BEENEXT, Karthik Bhat’s Force Ventures, Dr Vijay Kedia (Kedia Securities), Aditya Singh (Stride Ventures) and Pavitar Singh (Sprinklr). Other investors who participated in the round include Rahul Chaudhary (Treebo Hotels), Nikhil Vora and Kathan Shah (Sixth Sense Ventures), and Veda VC.
The funds raised will be primarily used to expand the team across functions, fulfil the customer demand internationally, R & D and expand to new geographies. The company has already onboarded some of the largest e-commerce and logistics enterprises as early adopters through trials/pilots and has filed IP for its technology in India, the US and the EU.
Unbox Robotics specialises in robotics-based fulfilment and distribution technology for small to large e-commerce, retail and logistics enterprises. The company’s high-speed robotics solutions are built to consolidate customers’ orders in fulfilment centres, as well as to sort them as per final delivery locations in distribution centres or delivery hubs. Its proprietary plug-and-play Swarm robotics can bring down the deployment time at locations to less than a week. The product’s USP lies in its ability to scan, sort, and dispatch packages in less than 50-70% physical space, while improving personnel productivity by more than 3X and reducing operational cost of package sorting by more than 60%— thereby solving challenges in warehouse management sustainably. The first-of-its-kind system allows users to automate not just bigger facilities with a physical space of a few hundred thousand sq ft, but also automate micro-hubs with less than 2,000 sqft space through an innovative and compact vertical sorting mechanism.
Pramod Ghadge, CEO and Co-Founder of Unbox Robotics, said, “We are obsessed with improving the ways packages are handled, distributed, and delivered to end customers. We believe that there’s a massive potential for building and deploying robotics tech to deliver more packages using smaller footprints at lower operational costs as we see more adoption of e-commerce and Q-commerce (quick commerce) across the globe. Since we launched our beta pilots with leading third-party logistics and e-commerce players in April 2021, we have already got orders from some of the leading e-commerce logistics companies. We are on our way to converting every other pilot or demo into a commercial contract. We will deploy the funds to build an A+ team to help our customers experience the future of logistics, sorting and supply chain across continents.”
“Unbox Robotics takes a novel approach in technology development to crack some of the most critical concerns in customers’ supply chains. We are excited to build a diverse team and further develop outstanding robotics technology for the future of global supply chains,” added Shahid Memon, CTO and Co-Founder of Unbox Robotics.
The founding team of Unbox comes with rich experience in the robotics space. Pramod had earlier implemented India’s first robot-based sorting project at a leading Indian e-commerce company, while Shahid built a robotics company in the past. Unbox Robotics earlier won the India Innovation Growth Programme 2.0 organised by the Government of India, Lockheed Martin and Tata Trusts among 2,000+ startups. The team was also awarded the Leaders in Innovation Fellowship programme by the Royal Academy of Engineering, UK.
Speaking on the investment, Anurag Ramdasan, Partner, 3one4 Capital, said, “Globally supply chain and logistics have been reshaped with the growth in e-commerce and D2C over the last decade. Every layer of the stack today requires incredible optimisation and automation today to service the growing demand. Unbox Robotics is doing amazing work in identifying and solving these high-value problems and the team built by Pramod, Shahid and Rohit bring deep domain expertise to tackle this problem at scale. We are highly excited to start this journey with them as they streamline logistics and redefine the space.”
Nikhil Vora, Founder and CEO of Sixth Sense Ventures, commented, “We believe the e-commerce and D2C boom is creating a large need for automation solutions within warehouses and FCs, with the industry slated to grow to $32 billion over the next 2-3 years. This coupled with evolving consumer expectations, labour shortage, omnichannel distribution, and technology accessibility has made robotics a priority for both e-commerce and fulfilment companies. Unbox’s compact, vertical, and modular system is well suited for current market needs. Excited to partner with Pramod and Shahid, who bring deep and relevant industry experience as we scale the company together.”
The logistics industry is expected to handle more than 2X the number of shipments in the next 5 years, while the logistics automation market is expected to reach more than $100 billion by 2026. There’s a massive opportunity to serve customers within the urban clusters using the smallest footprint of warehousing facilities possible and cater to customers in tier-2 & 3 cities with same-day deliveries. The market growth is fuelled by exponential growth in e-commerce and the focus on efficient warehousing operations.
About Unbox Robotics:
Unbox Robotics is a leading supply chain robotics technology company, specialising in robotics-based fulfilment and distribution technology for small to large e-commerce, retail and logistics enterprises. The product’s USP lies in its ability to scan, sort, and dispatch packages in less than 50-70% physical space through an innovative and compact vertical sorting mechanism. It helps personnel ramp up productivity by more than 3X — thereby solving challenges in intra-logistics operations sustainably. Unbox Robotics aims to redefine the global future of Sorting, Supply Chain and Logistics. For more information, visit www.unboxrobotics.com
About 3one4 Capital:
3one4 Capital is an early-stage venture capital fund based in Bengaluru, India. The firm works in select market categories and in the intersection of adjacencies that are large, growing, and ready for unique products and services. The themes pursued are SaaS and Enterprise Automation, Direct-to-Consumer products and services, Digital Media, FinTech, and Deep Technology, with a focus on areas such as machine-driven actionable intelligence services for the enterprise, ambient intelligence technologies, edtech, logistics and distribution, consumer products and services, and health.
3one4’s investments are biased towards companies exploiting technology to create, grow, or dominate large markets in India. The fund also invests a portion of its capital in US-focused companies that have feedforward effects into the themes being pursued in India.
Through a deep involvement strategy, the fund works with founding teams and subject-matter experts to prioritize and strategize for product-market fit, and then optimize for defensibility and growth in revenue and impact. With a focus on margins and on delivering uncompromised end-user experiences, the fund aims to reduce risk, detect new growth opportunities, and return rewarding outcomes to all the stakeholders involved.
With its third early-stage fund and its fifth fund overall, the firm now manages a combined corpus of INR 2,300 Cr (USD 300 Mn) and a portfolio of over 70+ investments across the early stage.
About Sixth Sense Ventures:
Sixth Sense Ventures, founded by Nikhil Vora, is India’s first domestic, consumer-focused venture fund – Investing in the Consumer of Tomorrow…Today. Their core philosophy lies in partnering “Early” with first-generation entrepreneurs that are disrupting large and sticky consumer categories and helping them create value by being a good sounding board. Founded in 2014, Sixth Sense Ventures currently manages over $500M across three funds and has been ranked as the top-performing AIFs in India by CRISIL. Both their funds (SSIO I and SSIO II) have been voted amongst the top 5 funds in India over the past decade.
Sixth Sense’s third fund, Sixth Sense India Opportunities III (SSIO III) has completed 17 investments including Parag Milk, Nobel Hygiene, Fraazo, Open Secret, Stylam, GoodDot, Neeman’s, Rage Coffee, Design Cafe, Bira, Storia, Giva, Freecultr, Dogsee Chew, Wonderchef, Vedic Cosmeceuticals, and Unbox Robotics.
Dec 13, 2021 | Startup
Techstars backed SaaS startup unremot that offers a community-driven business-in-a-box solution for consultants, has raised $700K in a seed round led by Inflection Point Ventures and participated by Digital Futurists Angels Network (DFAN), ah! Ventures and Point One Capital.
Since 18 months of the launch in Feb 2020, unremot has 14,000+ monthly active users, 40,000+ monthly visitors, 80% organic users and users from 52+ countries, with 70% from the US, Canada, UK, Australia & Germany.
Vinay Bansal, Founder & CEO, Inflection Point Ventures says, “unremot steps in at a time when discovering professionals on a seamless platform had become extremely important. We have organisations working on finding professionals from different domains but corporates. This platform has bridged the gap and helped Consultants create a community-like structure, increasing their discoverability factor. The fact that unremot is addressing the entire spectrum of remote working on an advanced level and keeping the entire experience efficient prompted us to back the company.”
The independent consultants struggle to manage their client meeting requests, scheduling, and payments, surviving the broken experiences through multiple products. This problem is solved by unremot, which is a business-in-a-box solution that provides a personal office to consultants that allows their clients to discover, request, schedule, pay and conduct meetings in a jiffy – all in one place. It combines online discovery, calendar, payments, and video conferencing into one screen and leverages a discovery-driven community interface.
Shiju Radhakrishnan, Founder & CEO, unremot says, “Our driving force for being entrepreneurs is to build products and watch users love it. The journey from our previous startup iTraveller to the current one, unremot is a testament to this pursuit. With unremot, we believe that the success of future businesses will depend on how best one could leverage the power of small communities at scale. unremot aspires to become a go-to place for consultants who want to build their client communities and we target to bring together 25 million users on unremot in the next 5 years.”
Commenting on the fund raise, Hemlata Varlani, CMO – DFAN shared, “DFAN is an angel network backed by a global community of 1500+ technology & business leaders. The start-ups we invest in are carefully chosen with due diligence and with our whole community actively contributing to their success. unremot’s solution brings its users on a community-based interface, enabling mutual discovery and engagement. They are solving a real problem with their ‘all-in-one tool’ designed for independent consultants to set up their own personalised online remote workspace. To capitalise the global gig economy, currently estimated to be $350 Bn and slated to grow to $455 Bn (2023), we are looking forward to unremot’s product being aggressively marketed along their robust GTM plan which includes organic search, community initiatives and affiliates.”
unremot is a 25 member fully remote team, led by Shiju Radhakrishnan, Nisanth Kumar, Binse Abraham, Avanti Shukla and Thahir Backer. The team has previously worked together in the past, before being acquired and taking their exits.
unremot aims to reach 1 Mn users by the end of 2022, 5 Mn by 2023 and 25 Mn by 2025. To fuel this growth, the company is targeting to raise a larger $2 Mn round at the end of the Techstars program.
Shiju Radhakrishnan and Nisanth Kumar started their entrepreneurial journey in 2012 when they founded iTraveller – an online travel planning application that enabled customers to customise and book their holidays. In 2018, iTraveller’s story took an interesting turn when it got noticed by lastminute.com – the European OTA giant was looking to enter the Indian market and decided to acquire iTraveller.com. Once bit by the entrepreneur bug, there is no going back. By early 2020, Shiju & Nisanth once again found themselves consumed by an idea that needed innovation. This later evolved into unremot.
Dec 11, 2021 | Startup, Tech
Direct-to-Consumer personal and home care products startup, Clensta has raised over INR 20 crore in a series A funding led by Venture Catalysts and Inflection Point Ventures.
Besides Hem Angels, part of Hem Securities Limited, N+1 Capital (RBF), the existing investors along with other marquee investors also invested in this funding round, the IIT-backed startup said in a Statement.
The funds raised will be used to scale up the company’s sales, ramp up brand marketing and expand Clensta’s online and offline presence across India. The brand has achieved a CAGR of over 130% and aims to earn Rs 1000 crore revenues in the next 5 years.
Dr. Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, Co-founder and President, Venture Catalyst says, “At Venture Catalysts we give a lot of significance to startups that work towards making the world a better place. Clensta’s innovative cleaning technology reduces usage of water to a great extent. Clensta’s entry into the D2C segment is likely to create a new category of personal and home care products. We are optimistic that Clensta will become a billion dollar tech-driven personal care brand in the next few years. Wishing the team a great journey ahead.”
Mitesh Shah, Co-Founder, Inflection Point Ventures says, “D2C wave is birthing many innovative and disruptive brands. Clensta takes the innovation further with the introduction of waterless tech in their products. Their understanding of the fast-growing D2C segment and a varied range of products in personal care impressed our investors to lead this round.”
Gaurav Jain, Director, Hem Angels says, Over the next five years, D2C brands present at least a USD 100B opportunity. Clensta have been quick to capitalise on the product, innovation and price white space. There’s no better time than now for Clensta to get off their growth plan and take their product to the next level, witnessing rapid acceleration of scale.
The five-year old start-up founded by Puneet Gupta in 2016, started with the flagship products based on Waterless Technology (Waterless Body bath & Shampoo) to enable bathing without the use of water.
As a developer of waterless technology and the curator of this category, the startup has a big presence in the B2B and B2B2C segment. However, Clensta is now tapping the massive D2C segment with its Super Cleansers filled with smart concentrates for household cleaning and plans to launch an innovative technology based personal care category.
“Clensta matlab Cleanliness, our ethos revolves around Innovation, Science and Customer Centricity. Developing innovative technology has been one of Clensta’s foremost attributes ever since inception. Keeping in mind the Indian Home Care market size of USD 6.2 billion, we have adopted an omni-channel strategy to ensure Clensta’s presence in offline as well as online markets. In this light, this funding comes as an affirmation that we continue to lead in the right path. We will be focusing on developing innovative and sustainable products, enhancing our relations with customers and marketing and expansion of our footprints across the country. We aim to use technology to scale the personal care segment and provide personalised shopping experience to our customers.,” says Puneet Gupta, Founder CEO, Clensta.
“There are many D2C brands in India, while Clensta aims to have its own space in this crowded market. We have disrupted this niche but how! By ensuring that we need to be a little smart for the smarter customers, the brand has charted a growth path unlike any other in the segment and came up with a super cleanser with smart concentrates wherein you can make your own super cleanser with just the tap water. Also, it’s easy on your pockets as there is no charge for 90% of water content in a ready solution. Contributing to United Nations Sustainable Development goals (UNDP), Clensta pledges to reduce the use of plastic and contribute to making our planet better and greener for all. All these things clubbed together makes Clensta a scientifically driven and ecologically ethical impactful brand, added Puneet Gupta.”
A National Award winner, Clensta has proved its capabilities by surviving through the threat of developing and selling all together a new product, moreover entering into the strategic tie-up with Cipla is another attribute of fast trajectory business growth. The Company has registered 20x growth in five years. A team of IIT, IIM & SRCC grads, working experience with EY, Ogilvy, Xiaomi, Deloitte, ITC and some cool, creative minds made this possible. CA Pankaj Mittal, CFO at Clensta executed the entire financial transaction. Khaitan & Co. acted as Legal Advisors to the company.
