Minjar Raises Fresh Funds; Vivriti Capital to Raise Rs 650-700 Cr; Team Indus Plans $40M Fund; Ofo Gets $700M Led by Alibaba & More
Here is a list of deals that happened in Indian Startup Ecosystem today. Read a brief description about all of them:
1. Bengaluru-based cloud computing platform Minjar that was founded in 2012 by tech professionals Vijay Rajapati, Anand, and Aparna Sharma, has raised fresh funding led by Blume Ventures. Early-stage funds Contrarian Capital and Emergent Ventures, and individual investors Pallav Nadhani, founder of FusionCharts, Helion Ventures co-founder Ashish Gupta, Indus Khaitan of SirionLabs, and Sharad Sharma of iSpirt also participated in the round.
Minjar has developed an intelligent cloud operations platform, Botmetric, that acts as a virtual cloud engineer to reduce the human effort involved in day-to-day cloud operations.
2. Financial products marketplace Vivriti Capital is in talks with multiple private equity players to raise approximately Rs 650-700 crore in the next three months, to invest in technology, people and to capitalise on the NBFC by lending.
Incorporated last month and registered as a non-banking finance company (NBFC), Vivriti Capital aims to become the largest marketplace of debt financing products for corporates, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and individuals in the next 5-7 years, founder Gaurav Kumar told ET.
3. The aerospace startup, Team Indus, which has been financially backed by a host of bigwigs including Ratan Tata, Nandan Nilekani, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, and Accel Partners’ Subrata Mitra and Shekhar Kirani, is looking to raise $40 million through a mix of corporate sponsorship and crowdfunding for its Moon Mission.
The startup has raised $20 million so far in equity funding and another $20 million in payload partnerships (for carrying third party payloads in the spacecraft).
Founded in 2011 by IIT-Delhi alumnus Rahul Narayan, Team Indus is part of the Google Lunar XPrize competition to land a privately-funded rover on the Moon by December.
4. Chinese bike-sharing start-up Ofo has raised more than $700 million in its latest funding round that was led by Alibaba Group and two others, reported ET.
Ofo said in a statement that besides Alibaba, the series E funding was led by Hony Capitaland CITIC Private Equity, with additional investment from current investors Didi Chuxing and DST Global.
The company’s valuation is still undisclosed however in April the firm was valued at upwards of $2 billion.
The new Ofo funding round comes after rival Mobike last month announced a $600 million investment led by Tencent Holdings, its largest financing round to date.
5. ETechAces Marketing and Consulting, which owns online financial services marketplaces PolicyBazaar and PaisaBazaar, is looking to raise Rs 500 crore from Wellington Management, one of the world's largest asset management companies with $1 trillion under management. The transaction, if successful, will be the first investment in a private technology company by Wellington in India. The new round of ETechAces will see another new investor coming on board, whose identity could not be ascertained, with majority of the capital being raised from domestic investors.
ETechAces owns both insurance marketplace PolicyBazaar and loans and credit cards marketplace PaisaBazaar.
6. Seattle-based online retail major Amazon has crossed $2 billion in India investments, as it has infused another Rs 1,680 crore in its main local unit Amazon Seller Services, taking the total capital invested to over Rs 13,800 crore ($2.1 billion).
The fresh capital infusion made last month will make it the second largest global investor in India’s digital economy, after Japanese internet major SoftBank which has invested close to $4 billion already, reported ET.
