AntFarm raises Series A funding from Bay Capital and Hausela Capital Partners

Digital Innovation company, AntFarm has raised Series-A funding from Bay Capital and Hausela Capital Partners. The funds that have been raised will be channelled to reinforce the current portfolio, grow upcoming businesses in the travel space and to build new early stage ventures in the fitness, hyper-local and mobile categories.

AntFarm has a track-record of building profitable business units in a year’s time with Stylista.com, a collaborative fashion label, and Fork Media, a native advertising platform.

AntFarm creates and incubates businesses. It has been identifying ideas with the potential to disrupt markets, leveraging years of expertise, resources, and experience to grow successful companies through collaboration and knowledge sharing. Headed by successful entrepreneur and media professional, Rishi Khiani who during his career, has led the internet divisions for two of India's largest media entities, The Times Group and the Network18 group, he also had a successful exit when he sold his first company UrbanEye Media to the Network18 group in 2006.

AntFarm’s framework has been built to accelerate early-stage company building with an intensive hands-on approach backed by an experienced team with deep knowledge of building leading consumer verticals.

Stylista has grown significantly since its launch, carving a niche in the e-commerce domain. Stylista recently collaborated with fashion e-tailer Myntra.com along with Flipkart.com to facilitate better access to affordable designer wear for new-age shoppers.

Fork media has become one of the largest native advertising platforms in India. With its recent acquisition of ClickZoot, a performance ad network, Fork Media has emerged as a one-stop destination for advertisers with a reach of over 80 million users.

AntFarm’s most recent venture, Arrive.com, is a travel discovery platform that is close to rolling out a mobile app for the East Asian market.

Rishi Khiani, Managing Director and CEO, AntFarm said,

With more and more start-ups in India entering the billion-dollar club, AntFarm is poised to explore business opportunities in the dotcom and mobile space in high impact markets and create products which are disruptive. Over the last year, we have already made successful forays in the fashion, advertising and travel industry verticals. We are now gearing up to disrupt the multi-billion dollar health/fitness space.

AntFarm follows a unique approach in jumpstarting successful businesses by putting together unique cross-functional teams led by industry veterans and entrepreneurs that work on business opportunities identified internally at AntFarm.

Piush Kumar, managing director of Hausela Capital Partners, said

The digital landscape in India is on an exponential growth trajectory. This dynamic landscape has thrown open exciting opportunities to create new products and innovative business models. AntFarm has demonstrated its mettle with successful ventures in the digital space. They bring a unique mix of industry experience, technology expertise and entrepreneurial spirit. And, we are confident that they will be able to build successful digital business models.

Antfarm has previously raised an angel round from Ravi Dhariwal, Chief Executive Officer of Bennett Coleman & Co. Limited, and leading entrepreneur, Sanjay Kalra, who previously served as the CEO of Tech Mahindra Ltd.