Coverfox, Chai Point raise Series C funding; Trucaller crosses 100 M daily active users

Friday April 20, 2018 , 4 min Read

Insure-tech startup Coverfox.com raised $22 million as a part of its Series C funding. The round was led by IFC and Transamerica along with other existing investors. As part of its ongoing fund-raiser, it was reported in June last year that the Mumbai-headquartered company had raised close to $15 million as a part of Series C led by US insurer Transamerica. The company is expected to use the funds to expand insurance coverage into Tier II and Tier III cities.

Chai Point has raised Series-C funding of $20 million in a round led by Paragon Partners. Existing investors include Saama Capital, DSG, and Eight Roads, the private equity arm of Fidelity India. According to the company, some of the investors invested super pro rata, which means these investors have the option to increase the percentage of their stake in the company in the follow-on rounds. The funding is aimed at further strengthening the brand’s multi-channel go-to-market. Chai Point had raised around $13 million before the current round.

Amuleek Singh, Co-founder and CEO, Chai Point

Big Data is big. According to IDC, Big Data revenues are estimated to cross $187 billion in 2019. It is said that the amount of data in the world doubles every two years, and by 2020, the digital universe will reach 44 zettabytes, or 4 trillion gigabytes, in data. The biggest revenue opportunities are in manufacturing and banking sectors. But, almost all major organisations are heavily invested in Big Data now.

Phonebook app Truecaller crossed 100 million daily active users (DAUs). DAUs are a key metric that determines the stickiness of an app and its relevance in the everyday lives of its audience. It has taken just a year to go from 100 million monthly active users to 100 million DAUs. In 2017, Truecaller is said to have blocked over 300 crore spam messages.

Ibibo Group Private Limited, which operates travel properties like Goibibo, redBus, YourBus (a vehicle tracking application), and others, secured a fund infusion of Rs 65 crore from its Singapore-based parent ibibo Group Holdings (Singapore) Pte Ltd, recent filings with Registrar of Companies showed. Since the beginning of this calendar year, it has infused more than Rs 161 crore into its India subsidiary.

Running design consultancy Perdix in Kolkata, and a move to Bengaluru had the founding team of GrabOnRent in a fix. Buying furniture, and office supplies like laptops and printers was proving to be too expensive and second-hand goods came with compromises. Says Shubham Jain, Co-founder, GrabOnRent, “All of us have been told that the only way of consuming a particular product is by buying it. We wanted to challenge that and provide an alternative consumption model in which a person can pay per use.” And GrabOnRent came to being.

A new report in Reuters has confirmed that Facebook plans to update its Terms of Service in the near future to keep GDPR rules from affecting the vast majority of its global users. According to the report, the updated ToS will mean that 1.5 billion users in Asia, Africa, Australia, and Latin America will be governed by US law instead of the stricter GDPR rules of the EU, which come into force on May 25, 2018.

In 2017, Amazon created more than 130,000 new jobs, Amazon Prime reached more than 100 million users globally, Amazon Web Services launched 1,400 new products and services, over 300,000 new US-based small and medium businesses joined Amazon Marketplace as sellers, and more – all these insights, and more, into Amazon’s stellar year, were revealed in CEO and Founder Jeff Bezos’ annual letter to shareholders.