[Funding roundup] Pratech Brands, Hubble, Zipy, Jobsgaar, PaySprint, and Tealfeed raise early stage funds

Pratech Brands raises $3 million from Sequoia Surge

Health and home focused house-of-brands, Pratech Brands has raised $3 million from Sequoia’s programme for early stage startups, Surge. The platform has also launched its education platform for wellbeing and nutrition called Hyugalife, which will host over a 1,000 brands.

Users will be able to consume content, buy products, and can avail of personalisaed and assisted shopping on the platform. The brands hosted on the platform range from women’s health, plant and ayurveda based supplements, kids health, sports nutrition and others. 

Founded in 2021 by former CFO of Nykaa, Sachin Parekh, former Amazon and Unilever executive Neehar Modi, and Anvi Shah, Pratech also houses Tesora, a platform aggregating its brands in the home segment. 

Hubble raises seed round from Sequoia Capital, angel investors

Fintech company Hubble has announced raising $3.4 million in a seed round led by Sequoia Capital. Angel investors including Snapdeal co-founder Kunal Bahl and investor Sateesh Andra also participated in the round.

The company said it will utilise the capital for hiring and to build a decentralised savings infrastructure to power its consumer-facing applications. It will also use the funds for on-boarding Indian and global brands on to its platform.

Founded in 2021 by Neeraj Tulsyan and Mayank Bishnoi, Bengaluru-based Hubble helps consumers save for their purchase goals, with partnering consumer lifestyle brands offering a 10 percent reward to the consumer for savings. 

The platform, which is currently available in beta in Android and iOS, claims to have a waitlist of nearly 2 lakh users and has partnered with over 25 brands.

Zipy raises $2.8 million led by Blume, Together Fund

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform for debugging and observability platform Zipy has raised $2.8 million in a seed round led by Blume Ventures and Together Fund.

The round also saw participation from notable angels including Jyoti Bansal, CEO of Harness; Neeraj Arora, former WhatsApp business head; and Co-founder of HalloApp, Deepak Diwakar; and Nishant Mungali of MindTickle, Better Capital’s Vaibhav Domkundwar; Co-founder of DriveTrain Alok Goel; Deutsche Bank’s Dilip Khandelwal; and other funds including BoldCap and FirstCheque. 

Headquartered in San Francisco with office in Pune, Zipy was founded by former MindTickle executive Vishalini Paliwal in July 2020. The self-serve platform helps software technology teams debug customer issues in real-time combining session replays, error monitoring and intelligent insights. 

Zipy announced its global launch on March 15, 2022 and has signed up over 100 customers for its platform. 

Fino Payments Bank acquires minority stake in PaySprint

Fino Payments Bank has acquired 12.19 percent stake in fintech company PaySprint Private Limited. The strategic investment is the first by Fino since its public listing and will support the bank’s digital initiatives. 

PaySprint offer next generation APIs for banking, payments, travel, lending, insurance, investment and other sectors. The platform helps payment service providers offer seamless services to customers by providing Unified Open API Platform in a plug and play model.

Founded in 2020, PaySprint recorded an annual GMV of Rs 5,500 crore for the financial year 2021-22. It has partnered with over 600 banks, NBFCs, MSMEs, fintechs and other startups.

Jobsgaar raises undisclosed pre-Series A round

Hyperlocal job-search platform Jobsgaar has raised an undisclosed amount in a pre-Series A round led by SucSEED Indovation Fund. Blume Founder Fund, BlackSoil, Karekeba Ventures, and others also participated in the round.

Jobsgaar connects the workforce to local employers and companies and helps them find walk-to-work jobs. It also helps the employers hire in Tier 2 and 3 cities. 

The company was founded in 2020 by Atul Pratap Singh and Moshe Jacob. It will utilise the capital for product development and distribution, said the company in a statement. 

Over the last six months, the company claims to have on-boarded nearly 1.5 lakh job-seekers across 15 towns of Uttar Pradesh and has nearly 600 employers and 7500 job opportunities on its platform. 

Tealfeed raises funds from angel investors

Knowledge-sharing platform Tealfeed has announced raising angel investors and returning investor Ah! Ventures. Founded in April 2021 by Rohit Garg and Sourabh Kaushik, Tealfeed will utilise the funds to scale its engineering and marketing teams and on-board new creators on the platform.

Content creators can post on Tealfeed’s knowledge-sharing platform to grow and monetize their audience. Users pay for the content they like and can use this to upskill themselves. Tealfeed has also introduced business-to-business model connecting working professionals to the creators as a monetisation model.

Tealfeed claims to have a monthly user base of 2.5 lakh and has seen over 32,000 blogs being published across technology, programming, design, startup leadership, marketing and other topics.