[Funding roundup] Suite42, Project Hero, FinAGG, Travel Buddy, TSAW Drones close early stage deals

B2B food processing platform Suite42 raises $4.3M seed round from Omnivore, Orios 

Suite42, a B2B food processing platform, has raised $4.3 million in a seed funding round co-led by Omnivore and Orios Venture Partners, with participation from Titan Capital, All In Capital, Pointone Capital, and angel investors, including Sujeet Kumar (Udaan).

The Bengaluru-based startup provides contract manufacturing solutions, including identification of manufacturing partners, fair price discovery, reducing the cost of food processing, product development, quality standardisation, optimising logistics, for food processing to B2B clients across the FMCG, agribusiness, and grocery industries. 

Founded in 2022 by Rahul Ratan, Ramakrishna Cheruku, Chethan S and Shriram S, Suite42 plans to use the funding for talent acquisition, launch raw material financing, and pilot cross border trade (exports). 

In the next 18 months, the startup plans to work with B2B clients across e-commerce, D2Cs, and FMCG and 2,000 modern trade outlets across multiple cities.

Despite the rapid increase in demand for branded food products, most food brands in India struggle with reliable manufacturing. At the same time, India has more than 40,000 food processing units that suffer from multiple inefficiencies including low capacity utilisation, lack of quality standardisation, high wastage, and limited access to working capital financing. 

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Construction tech startup Project Hero raises $3.2M from Ankur Capital, Omidyar Network

Construction tech startup Project Hero announced that it has raised $3.2 million (Rs 25.5 crore) in seed funding led by Ankur Capital and Omidyar Network India. The round also saw participation from angels such as Titan Capital and others.

The company plans to use the funds to scale up its technology, onboard more talent on the platform, and expand market presence. Previously, the company had raised $450,000 from Titan Capital, Anupam Mittal and Varun Alagh in July 2021.

Founded by IIT Roorkee graduates Satya Vyas, Pukhraj Grewal and Raghu Chopra, Project Hero works with contractors of various sizes and helps them recruit and manage workforce, typically construction workers of trades like bar bending, shuttering, masons, painters etc, via their product. By removing middlemen from the value chain, the platform is able to deliver cost and experience benefits to both sides of the marketplace. 

The startup claims to have over 4 lakhs construction workers on its platform and has placed over 3,000 workers on projects. 

FinAGG raises $3M in pre-series A led by BLinC Invest 

FinAGG Technologies, a Noida-based Supply Chain Finance (SCF) platform, has raised $3 million in a pre-series A round led by venture capital company BLinC Invest. Existing investor Prime Venture Partners also participated in this round. 

The fresh capital will be used to launch new products, expand current offerings in new cities, augment lending partnerships and invest in technology, the firm said in a statement. 

Founded in 2020 by Nipun Kohli and R. Srinivasan, FinAGG is a supply chain platform that provides closed-loop credit solutions to distributors, retailers and MSMEs via its proprietary platform —Quick Cash Flow. The company has partnered with over 15 anchor brands and has disbursed over Rs 1,200 crore to date to its distributors, suppliers, and retailers.

Skill assessment startup Equip.co raises Rs 3.2 Cr from Better Capital

Focussed on automating the recruitment and screening process, skill-based hiring platform Equip.co on Tuesday closed a $400,000 pre-seed round from Better Capital. The funds will be deployed towards hiring for product, engineering, and marketing roles, and towards onboarding subject-matter experts who will help expand the scope of skills that are currently being tested.

Founded in 2020 by Jayanth Neelakanta, the California-headquartered startup provides a skill assessments tool to recruiters to help them filter candidates across roles like engineering, data science, sales and support, etc, and create a shareable assessment in less than 2 minutes. Recruiters can use the content the platform provides or create their own tests. 

The team claims to have assessed thousands of candidates since its official launched in January 2022. The startup has a subsidiary in Bengaluru. 

Mumbai Angels invests in Travel Buddy

Angel investing platform Mumbai Angels has invested an undisclosed amount in Gurugram-based social travel network and D2C marketplace app Travel Buddy.

Founded in January 2020 by Saurav Chakraborty, Vijay Saini, and Paromita Bir, the startup offers an app for travellers, connecting them with fellow travellers, local guides and service providers (Hotels, Homestays, Transport etc). It claims to have a global community of over 1 million travel content creators and has enabled online shops for 25,000 travel providers. 

The team plans to spend 55% of the funds on improving technology and building a strong foundation to assist over 240 million users by 2025-26.

TSAW Drones raise undisclosed amount from Chandigarh Angel Network, Qubit Capital

TSAW Drones, a drone logistics service provider, has raised undisclosed amount from Chandigarh Angel Network, Qubit Capital and POD World.

Incubated at Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT), IIT Delhi, the Delhi-based startup had previously raised $325,000 in a seed round from We Founder Circle, Zypp Electric, Log9 Materials and Pedal Start.

The company, founded by Kishan Tiwari, plans to build a network of drone corridors across the country, which will act as an alternate mode of transportation for cargo movements. It is working with Zypp Electric to enable end-to-end last-mile deliveries anywhere within a city in 20 minutes. So far, TSAW has completed successful trials in Kolkata, Orissa, Indore, Mumbai, Gurgaon, Madhurai, Hyderabad and Coimbatore with clients.

Zevi closes seed round of $850,000 from WEH Ventures

Zevi, a site search engine built using NLP-AI (Natural language processing in artificial intelligence), has raised a pre-seed round of $850,000 led by WEH Ventures, Titan Capital, Veda VC, Entrepreneur First, and Kube VC. 

Founded by Shyam N and Anshul Basia, Zevi claims to address the issues and loss of revenues faced by brands due to inadequate search and discovery tools on their platforms. 

Its search solution eliminates the need for different search layers like Synonym, typo tolerance, ranking, etc and works for mixed query languages like Hinglish, Spanglish, etc. “We plan to invest and flush out our product and establish a growth engine to scale the business,” said Shyam N, co-founder Zevi. 

The startup says it powers search for brands like Juicy Chemistry, FacesCanada, Mango, The Ayurveda Experience, Downtown etc, and claims to have improved conversions by 11% and average order value by 28%. The platform is also available for enterprises, marketplaces and brands on Shopify for quick integrations.

Edtech platform PurpleTutor raises Series A round

Coding edtech platform PurpleTutor has raised Rs 10 crore (out of which Rs 3 crore was raised earlier) in its Series A round.

The round saw participation from Disruptors Capital, IvyCap Ventures, Arjun Malhotra (Co-founder, HCL) and others. The company plans to utilise the funds to build its product offering and strengthen the Artificial Intelligence (AI) product.

The Mumbai-based company has raised a total of $1.6 million of funding to date. It recorded a 4.5X jump in revenue in FY21 compared to last fiscal year. Its overall revenue for FY21 stood at Rs 10.41 crore. It claims to have over 2,00,000 registered users on the platform with hundreds of teachers.

Currently, PurpleTutor focuses on AI-driven live classes for children in the age group 6-18 years across computational thinking subjects such as app development, game design, 3D game design, AI and machine learning.

Digital NBFC FincFriends raises $1.1M

FincFriends, a digital NBFC which lends via Gurugram-based lending platform RupeeRedee, has raised $1.1 million as part of its third equity funding round led by existing stakeholder Digital Finance International (DFI). FincFriends is RupeeRedee's captive NBFC platform.

The new round brings the total fundraise to $9.2 million, which includes its Series B round of $1.1 million in March 2022.

The fresh capital infusion will enable FincFriends and RupeeRedee to expand their current offerings and geographical footprint to Tier 2 and 3 cities and scale its lending portfolio, it said in a statement.

Launched in 2018, RupeeRedee is a digital lending platform that offers instant short-term personal loans to customers. The tech-driven startup has a range of offerings which include small ticket-size flexible loans, underwriting and brokerage services along with Phygital, POS and LaaS services.

(This article will be updated with the latest news throughout the day)