[Funding roundup] Anakin, unremot, PingoLearn, Oben EV, FanAnywhere raise early stage funds

The momentum in early stage deals space continues till the end of the year. Sectors including ecommerce, edtech, electric vehicle and SaaS garnered early investor interest . Catch the day's funding news in this space.

YCombinator, others back ecommerce SaaS company Anakin

Ecommerce-focused Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider Anakin has raised $2 million in a seed round from Y Combinator, HOF Capital, Austen Allred, ACE & Company, Integrity, Pioneer Fund and a group of other angel investors, said a statement issued by the company.

The company will utilise the capital to hire across geographies, product development and expansion into other categories and to develop a self-servicing platform.  

Founded in September 2020 by Mohit Prateek and Rashmi Bala, the company offers competition intelligence solutions to businesses, offering live pricing data on competing websites to ecommerce stores and brands. 

“Ecommerce is rife with competition. We help companies and brands in optimizing all variables, not just pricing and help them grow faster. Our customers like us very much and recommend Anakin to others,” said Mohit Prateek, Co-Founder of Anakin in the statement.

The solution helps them set pricing automatically, improving profit margins based on the prices and stock availability. The SaaS platform also offers competitive intelligence based on stock levels, product visibility, new launches, promotional events and product attributes. 

SaaS startup unremot raises seed round from Inflection Point Ventures

Business-in-a-box solution for consultants, Unremot, has announced raising $700,000 (Rs 5.3 crore) in a seed round led by Inflection Point Ventures. The round also saw participation from Digital Futurists Angel Network, ah! Ventures and Point One Capital.

Founded in 2020, unremot offers its services to independent consultants to manage their client meeting requests, scheduling and payments through a SaaS platform. It also helps in online discovery of the consultants and provides a platform for video conferencing.

The Mumbai-headquartered company has a 25 member remote team led by Shiju Radhakrishnan, Nisanth Kumar, Binse Abraham, Avanti Shukla and Thahir Backer. A part of Techstars 2021 cohort, the company is looking to raise $2 million by the end of the program.

“With unremot, we believe that the success of future businesses will depend on how best one could leverage the power of small communities at scale. unremot aspires to become a go-to place for consultants who want to build their client communities and we target to bring together 25 million users on unremot in the next 5 years,” said Shiju Radhakrsihnan, founder and CEO of unremot in the statement.

Celebrity NFT platform FanAnywhere raises seed round from a clutch of investors

Blockchain platform for building celebrity NFTs and Fan Tokens of sports clubs, FanAnywhere, has raised an undisclosed amount in seed round of funding from a group of 16 investors, said the company in a statement.

The participants in the round include Oasis Capital, Scorpio VC, DeltaHub Capital, Dutch Crypto Investors, Hello Capital, Kangaroo Capital, Magnus Capital, ZBS Capital, HotBIt Exchange, R-930 Capital, Halving Capitals, Mars Ventures, Unilayer Capital, MoonCarl, IBC GRoup and 7 oClock Capital.

The platform was founded earlier this year by IIT Roorkee alumni Varun Chaudhary and Amit Kumar. 

“We are building the world's first platform for utility-based Celebrity NFTs, and NFTs & Fan Tokens of sports clubs, which will open gateways to Metaverses for celebrities. The funding will be deployed in making the technology more robust and enhancing our reach with the emphasis on transitioning the Celebrities as well as their fans towards the future of fan following and the FanAnywhere way of Reimagined Fandom,” said Varun and Amit in a statement.

ShopClues Co-founder Radhika Ghai’s venture kindlife raises seed round 

Curated beauty and wellness ecommerce and community platform, kindlife has raised an undisclosed amount in seed round led by Kalaari Capital-backed initiative CXXO, said a statement issued by the company.

The round also saw participation from investors including Java Capital, Titan Capital, TDV and prominent investors like Pankaj Gupta, CEO of GII, CEO of BharatPe Suhail Sameer, Co-Founder at BharatPe Shashvat Nakrani, Co-Founder of Loginext Manisha Raisinghani, CBDO of Diageo Luxury Shweta Jain and attorney-at-law Sakshi Soni.

Founded in March 2021 by Shopclues Co-Founder Radhika Ghai, former ShopClues executives Manasa Garemella and Vidit Jain, kindlife hosts curated products from over 150 ‘kinder’ brands which are plant based, organic, toxin-free, eco-conscious and cruelty-free.  This includes products across beauty, nutrition and homecare.

“Indian consumers want to make kinder choices and kindlife with its community of experts, kind-brands and robust technology will ensure that we are present every step of the way to enable these kind choices,” said Radhika Ghai, Cp-Founder, and CEO of kindlife in the statement. She further added that the company was targeted at the premium consumers in India who were driving over 40% demand for direct-to-consumer products. 

PingoLearn raises Rs 2 crore from clutch of early investors

Short-video based English language learning platform PingoLearn has raised Rs 2 crore led by Titan Capital, Haresh Chawla and AngelList Syndicate. The Pune-headquartered startup will utilise the capital for team expansion, setting up content machinery and to develop the product further, it said in a statement.

Founded in 2021 by BITS Pilani alumni Mohit Menghani and Shubham Maheshwari, PingoLearn uses video-based real-life conversations and provides users with feedback on pronunciation and fluency. 

“I come from a Tier-III city and had very little exposure to spoken English in my school days. You speak what you hear, and that becomes your version of the language, be it vocabulary or pronunciation. My version of the English language has significantly improved over the years by consuming videos and getting feedback from my friends. We are artificially creating that environment at PingoLearn with snackable content for learning actual usable language and speech assessment engines for immediate feedback on pronunciation and fluency,” said Mohit Menghani, Co-Founder of PingoLearn in the statement.

Users have clocked 3000 hours on the app since its inception in May 2021, claims the company.

Two-wheeler EV maker Oben EV raises seed round from We Founder Circle

Bengaluru headquartered two-wheeler electric vehicle manufacturer OBEN EV has raised $1.5 million in a seed round from We Founder Circle. 

The round saw participation from notable investors from We Founder Circle including  Rakesh Somani, Co-founder of Life Element, Gaurav Juneja - Serial investor, Eminent Cars, Siddharth Shah, Managing Director, Rajesh Motors, and other prominent angels like Sumeet Pathak, Dr. Milan Modi, veteran technologist Dr. Aloknath, said a statement issued by the company.

Oben EV will utilise the funds to launch its product in the market, accelerate new product development and expand experience centres.

“We are very excited to raise the seed round as this fund will help us enter the market with the first completely homegrown and indigenously developed performance motorcycle and deliver our first set of vehicles to the customers in the next six months,” said Madhumita Agarwal, Co-Founder of Oben EV. 

The company founded in 2020 by Madhumita Agarwal and Dinkar Agarwal will launch its first indigenously developed performance electric bike in 2022. The bike will run for 200 km on a single charge with a top speed of 100 kilometer per hour. 

G7CR Technologies invests $1 million in startups via technology services

Bengaluru-headquartered cloud services provider G7CR Technologies has invested $1 million across multiple startups via technology services in the last quarter, said the company in a statement. The company helped over 100 startups in India, Middle East and Africa in migrating to cloud, helping them manage their setup on cloud and modernisation of their application.

Under the Startup 360 initiative, G7CR plans on investing in over 200 startups over the next 4-5 months, taking the number to over 1000 startups for FY 2021-22. G7CR will also invest in companies in the business-to-business SaaS space, with benefits ranging from $5000 to $25,000 and expanding their services to new geographic regions including the Middle East and  Africa. 

“Startups want to utilise the advantages that cloud technology bring to their business and at the same time they also look for a partner with advanced skills to migrate, optimise, and manage their existing workloads to the cloud and this is where G7CR comes into picture,” said Dr Christopher Richard, MD and Chief Cloud Architect at G7CR Technologies. 

He further added, “The products and services of these start-ups where we have invested via technology services have impressed us. By building a cloud technology platform and working closely with these start-ups we have understood various business challenges they face on a day-to-day basis.”

G7CR is an Expert Azure Managed Services Partner and offers its services to multiple verticals including banking, insurance, manufacturing, healthcare, PSUs and others.

Prodapt acquires UK-based SLR Dynamics

Chennai-headquartered Prodapt Solutions, which provides digital transformation solutions to telecom, Digital Service Providers (DSP) and new-age technology companies, has announced the acquisition of UK-based SLR Dynamics. The acquisition will help Prodapt maintain leadership position in the connectedness vertical, said the company in a statement.

SLR Dynamics offers digital engineering and automation services in the technology, media and entertainment and telecommunications verticals and counts large telcos in Europe and Africa among its customers. Prodapt plans on adding close to 500 employees to the team, from its current strength of over 100 employees. 

This is Prodapt’s second acquisition in 2021 after it announced the acquisition of Silicon Valley-based Innovative Logic in August 2021. Prodapt is part of The Jhaver Group which employs over 22,000 people across 64 locations globally.