Bajo Foods, What’s Up Wellness, Octanom raise early-stage deals

Bajo Foods raises $2M led by Mount Judi Venture

Bajo Foods Private Limited, the parent company of Keto Brand – Lo! Foods, raised $2 million in a funding round led by Mount Judi Venture. Investors like S Ramadorai (Former VC TCS) and KP Balaraj, Founder of KPB Trust (former Co-founder of Sequoia Capital India and WestBridge Capital) also participated in the round.

Bajo Foods plans to use the funds for building its new product ranges, DiabeSmart, and Protein Chef, as well as expanding its channels to offline retail, B2B, and hospitals. It will also look to bolster its leadership team in branding and revenue generation to drive its growth ambitions. With this funding, the FMCG startup expects to grow by 3.5X in the next 18 months. 

Founded in 2019, Bajo Foods provides low-carb food products. Its product range has expanded from flour to cookies, mixtures, namkeens, and chocolate.

Bajo Foods also has cloud kitchens in four cities—Gurugram, Delhi, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad. It aims to expand to around 35 cloud kitchens in 12 months in Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, and Chennai through the franchisee model. 

Bigyellowfish secures $1.1M in seed funding

Employee experience platform Bigyellowfish announced that it raised $1.1 million as part of its seed funding. Powerhouse Ventures led the investment with participation from Anicut Capital and Innoport. 

The funds will be used for global sales and marketing, scaling up software and platform capabilities, and R&D to speed up innovation and enhance the company's global reach.

"We are delighted to back Soma and Kunal as they continue to help global companies digitise their employee engagement and deliver measurable business results that impact their safety, employee engagement, development and retention goals,” Kshitij Golwalkar, General Partner, Powerhouse Ventures said, in a media statement.  

“Bigyellowfish's experience in working with some of the largest companies in the Shipping & Maritime sectors positions them well to enter other safety-critical industries where the need for superior employee experience solutions is immense,” he added.

Founded in 2019 by Soma Sundar Gollakota and Kunal Pancholi, Bigyellowfish enables business leaders across Safety, HR, Operations & Asset Management with predictive signalling and decision support mechanisms.

The company currently services clients across the EU, UK, and Singapore. Bigyellowfish claims it has grown 4X since 2020. It plans to double down and increase revenues from safety-intensive industries like maritime, aviation, oil & gas, manufacturing, and logistics and expand its operations across the US and the Middle East in the coming years. 

PedalStart closes $300,00 pre-seed round

Gurugram-based startup founders’ community platform PedalStart announced that it closed a $300,000 pre-seed round led by AngelBay, and Alok Bansal, Co-founder, Policy Bazaar and Paisa Bazaar. Mayank Jain, Chief Product Officer and Head of Marketing at Snapdeal and others also participated in the round.

PedalStart will use these funds to build a core team and tech, for easy movement and connection of founders with mentors, and is planning to onboard more than 3000 founders in the community. 

“Being a startup founder, I can understand the problems an early-stage startup founder would face in his journey. At PedalStart, watching how they work to solve those problems and help the early-stage startup founders grow in the startup ecosystem, hit a nerve,” Alok Bansal said, in a media statement.

The company is an open platform for early-stage startup founders where they can learn, build and raise. With this framework, founders get the mentoring and funds at the right stage along with other benefits at the perfect time without random dilution of equity. PedalStart claims it has grown 10x in the last 8 months.

“We are re-investing in the current round as the Company has grown faster than what we anticipated which is a testimony of the execution capabilities of the founders and the team,” Sorabh Agarwal, Co-founder, AngelBay said, in a media statement.

Launched in 2021, PedalStart helps build founders through their startup ideas, with the help of ex-entrepreneurs, successful startup founders, domain experts and angel investors. 

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What’s Up Wellness raises angel funding

Gurugram-headquartered digital-first wellness brand What’s Up Wellness has raised an undisclosed amount from a clutch of investors in its maiden angel fundraising round. 

The round was led by Puneet Sehgal (former COO of Hopscotch), Sahil Kukreja (Director, The Butternut Co.), Ritika Jaisinghani (Founder, Elaa), Maharshi Ganatra (Partner, MGA), and Ritesh Ritolia (MD and Partner, Boston Consulting Group). Founders of consumer brands such as Soumya Kant (Co-founder, Clovia) and Deep Bajaj and Mohit Bajaj (Co-founders of Sirona Hygiene) also participated in the round.

The company will use the funds for team-building, scaling research and development, and strategic product development to launch new product categories and towards furthering its brand-building efforts.

Founded in 2021 by Sayantani Mandal and Vaibhav Makhija, What’s Up Wellness aims to make wellness fun and frictionless for its users. The startup has two products as of date: What’s Up Beauty Gummies for Hair, Skin, and Nails and What’s Up Sleep Gummies with muscle and nerve relaxation. 

The brand currently stands at an ARR of Rs 5 crore and aims to grow it to over Rs 12 crore over the next six months, with five new product launches planned, as per the company.

Octanom Tech raises pre-seed funding

Algorithm-based investech startup Octanom Tech has raised an undisclosed amount at a pre-money valuation of $2.2 million in its pre-seed round led by Shankar Vailaya (former Director of Sharekhan Ltd), Nitin Gupta (Founder, and CEO, Asymmetrique), among other angel investors.

Octanom will deploy the fresh capital to launch its maiden platform next month, as well as to expand leadership and talent.

The startup builds platforms in the financial market space with the vision of being India’s largest retail movement for traders and investors. It plans to launch three platforms in the investech space over the next two years in India and the US.

(The copy will be updated throughout the day with the latest news.)