Hungry Foal Raises Funding; Wayforward Bags $1M; Sapphire Foods to Raise $60M; Zomato to Acquire Runnr & More
Ride-hailing firm Grab, Uber's largest rival in Southeast Asia, is planning to raise funding as it works to develop new offerings such as financial services.
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Here is a list of deals that happened in Indian Startup Ecosystem today including funding, merger, acquisition, fund launch etc. Read a brief description about all of them:
1. Gurugram-based Hungry Foal, a for-profit social venture has raised debt funding from State Bank of India under Stand up India Scheme. The objective of this scheme is to facilitate collateral free bank loans between Rs 10 lakhs and Rs 1 Crore to at least one women borrower per bank branch for setting up a greenfield enterprise.
Hungry Foal’s products are available across 200 stores in Delhi / NCR. With this funding, company will increase its presence to 1000 stores in next 3 months. To cater to the growing demand, company will launch its product SKUs targeting the middle and upper middle class.
Given its partnership with SINED, NDRI, Karnal, Hungry Foal will also launch a new range of products, under the able guidance of scientists at NDRI.
2. Kolkata-based Mihup Communications Pvt Ltd, which operates Mihup, an artificial intelligence-based personal mobile assistant app, has ceased its operations, reported VCCircle. The company’s desktop site is non-operational and the mobile app could not be found on the Google Play Store.
3. Wayforward Health Pvt. Ltd, which offers mental healthcare solutions through its mobile platform wayForward, has raised close to $1 million in angel funding from three individual investors, as reported by VCCircle. The startup raised the funds from Harsh Mahajan, a radiologist; Farhan Naqvi, a technology investment banker with Deutsche Bank; and Sreepathy Viswanathan, senior vice president of M&A and partnerships at Hinduja Global Solutions Inc. The company will use the funds to build its technology and the US sales team.
4. Flipkart-owned online fashion retailer Myntra has appointed former Amazon executive Jeyandran Venugopal as its new chief technology officer (CTO), replacing Ajit Narayanan, who has resigned from the company. Venugopal becomes Myntra’s third CTO in less than a year—before Narayanan took over the role in November last year, Shamik Sharma was Myntra’s technology chief, reported DealStreetAsia.
5. Sapphire Foods, the company that owns more than 300 outlets of Pizza Hut and KFC in South India and Sri Lanka is looking to raise $60 million or Rs 360-400 crore from private equity investors to fund its new store expansion plans, reported ET. The company is being valued at around $250-300 million.
6. KKR-backed investment bank-turned-financial services firm Avendus Capital is in talks to acquire UK and Ireland-based Ocean Dial Asset Management, a $550-million, long-only investor in Indian public equities, reported TOI. The transaction, which is likely to close by July end, is expected to help Avendus to boost its public equities presence.
7. Germany-based online food ordering service Delivery Hero plans a Frankfurt initial public offering this year, reported ET.
The firm aims to raise around 450 million euros ($506 million) "in the coming months" from new shares issued in a capital increase, while some shares held by existing investors will also be on sale. With this funding, the firm plans to expand further around the world.
8. Zomato has agreed to buy hyperlocal logistics startup Runnr in an all-stock deal, to start fulfilling deliveries on its own.
The transaction valued Zomato at $800 million while Runnr, which is the merged entity of Roadrunnr and TinyOwl, two of the most well-funded startups of 2015, had an enterprise value of $40 million, reported ET.
9. Ride-hailing firm Grab, Uber's largest rival in Southeast Asia, is planning to raise funding as it works to develop new offerings such as financial services, reported Reuters.
Bosch India today announced that 13 tech startups have graduated from its launch accelerator program- Discover, Nurture and Accelerate (DNA). After 18 weeks of training, Bosch will partner and collaborate with these technology startups that work in the areas of, aerospace, mobility, social impact, healthcare and agriculture, reported ET.
10. The telecom regulator launched three apps and a portal for service providers, reported ET. The three apps - Trai MyCall App, auto test enabled MySpeed app and Do-not-disturb 2.0 app - are aimed at improving customer experience through real-time feedback from over 1 billion mobile phone users in the country, to service providers so they can enhance quality of services.
11. Cable television distributor DEN Networks and Jasper Infotech, which owns and operates online marketplace Snapdeal are selling their entire stake in their joint venture, TV merchandise channel Macro Commerce, to a Noida-based company named Pimex Broadcast for Rs 10 lakh, reported ET.
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