[Funding roundup] FreshR, Spardha, PMaps, TGP raise early-stage capital

Fish and meat distribution startup FreshR raises $1.2 million

Fish and meat distribution startup FreshR has raised $1.2 million in a seed round led by Axilor Ventures and 1crowd. It will use the funds to expand its geographical footprint, develop and implement its tech stack, and grow the team.

Earlier, FreshR had raised a pre-seed round from Villgro, Upaya Social Ventures, Beyond Capital Fund, and other early-stage funds. 

Founded by Ambika Satapathy and Sadananda Satapathy, the B2B meat and fish aggregation and distribution startup helps farmers, distributors, restaurants, and grocers sell and buy on a single platform. It operates across Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh. 

Earlier this year, FreshR had launched an application to standardise prices and grades for the sector and allow bulk buyers from across India to place orders and track quality processes. 

Edtech startup Spardha raises Rs 8 crore in pre-Series A2 round led by Inflection Point Ventures

Spardha, Pune-based digital music and performing arts education training platform, raised Rs 8 crore in a pre-Series A2 round led by Inflection Point Ventures (IPV). The round also saw participation from Mumbai Angels and We Founder Circle.

The startup will use the funds to hire across sales and operation teams, along with product upgrades, brand building, and marketing initiatives to expand its presence in the global market. 

Founded in 2016 by Saurabh Srivastav, Amrita Srivastav, and Rikhil Jain, Spardha offers personalised learning and online training programmes in the field of music and performing arts. It claims to have a specially designed curriculum and over 400 certified trainers and professionals who offer online lessons. 

The startup claims to be expanding to the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and UAE and has increased its revenue by 10x in the last 14 months.

Cybersecurity startup SubCom raises $1 million led by YourNest

Cybersecurity startup SubCom (Subconscious Compute Pvt Ltd) raised $1 million in a seed round from YourNest Venture Capital, ISV Capital, and existing investor Entrepreneur First.

The round also saw participation from Bikky Khosla (Chairman, TradeIndia), Varun Alagh (Founder, Mamaearth), Harjot Gill (Founder, FluxNinja and Netsil), and senior executives from Google, Netflix and Visa.

Founded in December 2020 by Anter Virk and Dilawar Singh, SubCom provides endpoint observability through ‘Habituation Neural Fabric’. The AI-driven technology allows users to observe and manage the trust score of their endpoints like laptops, mobile phones, and IoT devices in real-time.

Similar to biological intelligence, SubCom's Habituation Neural Fabric learns to differentiate between actual threats and safe signals. It is adept at processing volumes of data on the endpoint and picking up anomalies with unprecedented precision in real-time. SubCom analyses, classifies, and quantifies the detected irregularities into a simple, easily understood trust score for the user, the company said.

"SubCom's Habituation Neural Fabric is a game-changer, helping everyone tackle an Internet that remains weaponised by anonymous hackers with ephemeral footprints. Corporations can now outpace zero-day exploits with 1/10th the time, effort, cost, and cybersecurity-skilled workforce," said Ranjeet Shetye, Partner, YourNest VC.

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PMaps secures Rs 5 crore led by Indian Angel Network, Lets Venture

PMaps, a visual-based candidate assessment platform used to improve hiring outcomes, has raised Rs 5 crore in a Series A round led by Indian Angel Network and LetsVenture. The funding round will facilitate the company’s GTM initiatives aimed at accelerating customer acquisition and strengthening key partnerships.

The tech-enabled platform enables companies to hire through the web, desktop, and mobile applications, and provides language-agnostic and engaging pre and post-hiring assessments. Through its smart online invigilation — PMaps Invigilator — the visual-based assessment claims to bring down hiring time (60 percent) and costs.

“In today’s digital-first world, traditional or text-based candidate assessments are suboptimal as they are time-consuming, easily manipulated, and assume the candidate knows reading. Considering the influx of applications recruiters receive these days, PMaps visual-based assessment is the need of the hour as it measures candidate competence in less than 11 minutes. This capital infusion is nothing short of a vote of confidence in PMaps’ performance and direction,” said Tarvinder Kaur, Co-founder and CEO of PMaps.

Geospatial intelligence startup Intents Mobi raises $1 million

Gurugram-based geospatial intelligence startup Intents Mobi raised $1 million led by DevX Venture Fund, Unnati Labs, and marquee strategic angels from the logistics and mobility sector.

The startup will use the funds to invest in tech capabilities, increase the collection of GIS information for the country, and further pump up enterprise sales. It had raised $600,000 in a seed round in April 2021.

Founded by Naresh Kumar Kachhi and Tabrez Alam, later joined by Balasubramaniam S and Prakash Velusamy, the 15-member startup utilises a network of ‘Scouts’, a community of over 700,000 users, who contribute to the data generation for location intelligence.

Co-founder Naresh said, "It is heartening to bag funding at this crucial stage when we are focussing on growing our capabilities and widening our tech stack. We work on solving the issues with GIS data that impacts every industry connected to mobility.”

Naresh added, “Our hardware-independent technology ensures that we can map the entire country without investing heavily in capex. Since we already generate insights for almost 4.5 crore kms of roads per day and process three million geocodes every month, the funds will enable us to increase this by 5X and cover the 50 most populous Indian cities by the end of the year.”

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The Gaming Project raises $500,000 in seed round

The Gaming Project (TGP), a cloud gaming platform, raised $500,000 in a seed round from FAAD Network, along with Upsparks, BlackKite, and SucSEED Indovation Fund, among others. The round also saw participation from MaGEHold and Hem Angels.

Cloud gaming is a form of online gaming, where the game runs on remote servers. The users can play any game they want without the constraint of having expensive physical gaming rigs.

The Gaming Project (TGP) is democratising access to AAA games with its platform that allows users to play any video games/AAA games on any device (mobiles, laptops). Such devices, with even modest configurations, can leverage TGP to play the most advanced console/PC based games.

Founded by Manan Mittal and Sarang Atri in March 2020, the startup claims to have signed up over 300,000 users on its platform.

Hyphen Raises $1 million in a pre-seed round

Hyphen, an experiential living community, raised $1 million in a mix of debt and equity in its pre-seed round from notable angels from Silicon Valley and Sriram Puthucode (former VP at Symantec Global).

The startup will deploy the fresh capital to expand into new markets, launch new product types, and integrate technology and automation to drive consumer experiences.

Hyphen (formerly, Dwellingo) launched its first property in August 2021, and has since been on a "quest to eliminate urban loneliness".

Founded in 2021 by Anirudh Rao, Grishma Reddy, Rishi Sreedharan, and Samarth Gowda, the company claims to grow at 200 percent monthly and plans to have 6,000 beds and expand into five markets, starting with Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai, and Delhi-NCR by 2023.

“Post COVID-19, the co-living market has witnessed huge growth with people flocking back to offices. There is a greater need for players/companies to offer more than just four walls and a roof. Hyphen’s emphasis on hybrid, experiential-led living sets them apart and takes a huge leap into the future of organised living,” said Sriram Puthucode, former VP at Symantec Global.

(This is an ongoing story and will be updated with the latest deal announcements throughout the day.)