[Funding roundup] Organic Kitchen, Humalect, Kennect, DPhi etc raise early-stage deals

Organic Kitchen raises $1 million in seed round

Gurugram-based Organic Kitchen has raised $1 million in a seed round from a host of prominent angel investors, including Siddharth Chaudhary, Abhishek Dhaka, and Nitin Sahjwani. 

Organic Kitchen would utilise the funds to build technology, develop the consumer and farmer app, and expand its range of products to over 250 certified organic fruits, vegetables, and groceries. 

The company will deploy supply chain strategies for organic food products through this latest funding by developing farmer clusters and drones in four agro-climatic regions: Solan (Himachal Pradesh), Nawalgarh (Rajasthan), Palla (Delhi), and Sundana (Haryana), the company said in an official statement.

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Humalect raises $750K in seed round 

Humalect, a no-code platform helping organisations automate DevOps, has raised $750,000 from early-stage investor StartupXseed Ventures. 

The raised funds will be strategically utilised to build the team and extend product features. 

Founded by IIT Bombay and BITS Pilani alumni, Humalect is a no-code platform that helps companies automate their DevOps. The DevOps engineering function is responsible for taking software into the hands of the users. Humalect reduces the time for software delivery while ensuring the best cloud and security practices.

“Typically, development teams spend at least 25% of their time setting up the cloud and managing the infrastructure, which could be utilised to build and launch their products in the market. That is why we built Humalect, focused on automation, flexibility, and the highest security standards for development teams, product teams, and business owners alike,” said Humalect co-founder Rajesh Tilwani. 

B2B SaaS sales startup Kennect raises $700K in seed round

Kennect, a Delaware- and Mumbai-based software-as-a-service sales acceleration startup, has raised $700,000 in a seed round led by FortyTwo VC.

With this investment, Kennect plans to ramp-up its engineering team and expand its commercial presence in the North American and European markets.

Kennect has targeted more than 100 enterprises over the next two years. Some of its marquee customers include Indian and global pharmaceutical companies like Sanofi, Zydus, Lupin, AstraZeneca, Lonza, among others.

"We all know sales is hard and managing sales compensation can be a pain point for many companies. Kennect aims to reward the hard work of every sales professional through an incentive platform that helps them stay on top of their incentive earnings. With its intelligent nudge feature, every sales rep is now aware of their next best action in real-time to boost their take-home compensation,” said Pulkit Agrawal, Co-founder and CEO, Kennect.

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DPhi raises in $314K seed round

AI community DPhi has raised $314,000 (Rs 2.5 crore) from Selçuk Boydak, a serial AI entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist.

Founded in 2020, DPhi is a global AI community with headquarters in Belgium and India. DPhi provides free AI and data science courses by industry experts from large tech companies or startups worldwide.

As part of this strategic investment, DPhi will intensify its collaboration with the Swiss scale-up companies AI Business School and Global AI Hub to create a unique global AI ecosystem.

“Right now, the adoption of AI that we are seeing is just due to the application of AI at large tech companies. We are yet to harness the full potential of AI across industries and companies of all sizes. As AI is rapidly evolving, its education, awareness and adoption of development practices are more important than ever for each one of us. With DPhi, we aim to prepare the world for the AI era by educating and building AI for the people, by the people,” said Chanukya Patnaik, Founder, DPhi. 

Oorja raises funds from Capital A

Oorjaa, a company that aims to empower automotive companies to design better batteries, has raised an undisclosed amount from Capital A, a venture seed fund for early-stage startups.

The amount will be made available from “Evolve”, a $10 million cleantech fund that Capital A had launched earlier this year.

“We at Oorja believe in design processes that help in devising products focusing on specific customer problems.  We have built an easy-to-use and interactive interface based on a maintenance-free SaaS model, the first in the industry. Our solution is unique and beneficial to the ecosystem in many ways. It is a faster and highly accurate solution for heat and capacity fade prediction, an area that has been the Achilles heel for the EV industry,” said Vineet Dravid, Founder, Oorja.

“With Capital A’s investment, we will be able to expand our market access and reach out to OEMs with the game-changing solution and our expert support as well as calibration services in a highly cost-effective manner,” he added. 

Orxa Energies raises Pre-Series A round

Orxa Energies, a high-performance electric vehicle and energy systems startup, has raised an undisclosed amount SAR Group’s e-mobility arm—Lectrix.

The Bengaluru-based startup also announced its strategic collaboration with Lectrix E-Vehicles to accelerate the launch of Orxa’s flagship all-electric high-performance motorcycle—The Mantis. 

The funds raised will be utilised in developing the manufacturing capabilities required to ensure that the Mantis’ production will be able to keep up with the projected demand, the company said.

“We are simultaneously growing our lean team by nearly five times in the coming months, with a focus to strengthen our engineering muscle, and developing similar teams in production, quality control, supply chain, and marketing. In the last few months, we have added 25% to our team and by October 2022, we will have doubled our team size,” said Ranjita Ravi, Co-founder, Orxa Energies.