Heckyl Technologies raises $3.5 million Series A investment from IDG Ventures & Seedfund Advisors
Mumbai based financial analytics venture Heckyl Technologies has raised Series A funding of $3.5 million from IDG ventures, Seedfund Advisors and Rajiv Dalal, an angel investor. Earlier last year Heckyl had taken its first round of seed funding from Seedfund Advisors. With this investment, Venkatesh Peddi from IDG Ventures will join the board of directors alongside Paula Mariwala from Seedfund.
Heckyl Technologies was founded in Dec 2010 by Abhijit Vedak, Jaison Mathews, Mukund Mudras and Som Sagar. Heckyl Technologies was a 2011 TechSparks finalist. The startup has created a proprietary platform that analyses news and data to provide meaningful insights to broking firms to make their trading decisions. The current investments will be used for expanding into new regions and development of newer platforms to analyse the financial sector better.
Services that Heckyl provides falls under the umbrella of news and data analytics, which is approximately $50 billion global opportunity. While they will continue to tap into the brokerage market, Heckyl is now poised to release data mining platform for financial institutions and the hedge fund industry. “We at Heckyl are very excited about the new capabilities that our big data platform will deliver to our clients.” said Som Sagar, COO, Heckyl Technologies, who oversees product development.
Talking about the investment, Pravin Gandhi, founding partner, Seedfund Advisors said, “Our second round of funding to Heckyl reiterates our belief in the team and the product they have created. In the last two years, Heckyl has proved the usefulness of product offering in the Indian markets. It has a strong technological base and has robust systems in place to adapt the product for the global market. We are happy to be a part of the global growth story of an Indian product company serving the financial sector.”
On IDG’s decision to put in funds, Venkatesh Peddi, VP, IDG Ventures India said, “We are very impressed with the significant revenue lift and customer traction of Heckyl. They have built a sophisticated platform which according to our research has a large global potential. In Heckyl, we have found a very passionate team with strong business acumen and we are very excited to be part of the company."
Within 16 months of launch the product, Heckyl has signed on Angel Broking, Sharekhan, Motilal Oswal, IndiaInfoline and Religare as its clients, and currently has 20 broking houses on-board. They claim to be India’s largest non-broking company which has the largest number of traders using their news and derivative analysis platform.
As their business expands into different geographies and verticals, Heckyl will also be looking at bringing in new talent to help them grow and scale.
