Startup news and updates: daily roundup (February 28, 2023)

BuyHive partners with 40Seas to offer cross-border B2B financing to SME buyers

Tech-enabled business-to-business (B2B) global sourcing platform BuyHive has partnered with 40Seas, a provider of supply chain financing solutions, to offer cross-border B2B financing solutions to small and medium businesses.

Through this partnership, BuyHive will enable SME buyers in the United States, Canada, and the UK to get up to $1 million worth of credit for their sourcing from China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and India under ‘Buy Now Pay Later’ (BNPL) terms.

BuyHive's new financing tool, developed in collaboration with 40Seas, will enable buyers to quickly figure out the credit limits they can get, based on their production volumes and other factors, the release states. With this tool, buyers can get access to the funding they need to purchase products, without having to worry about cash flow or credit constraints.

Chargeup appoints ex-Meta executive Satish Mittal as Chief Digital Officer

Chargeup, the company building India’s first FiNeTech platform (Finance-Network-Technology Platform) in the EV sector, recently appointed former Meta Executive and ex-CTO, Vodafone, Satish Mittal, as its Chief Digital Officer. In his new role, Satish will be responsible for furthering the technology, digital, and partnership initiatives for the brand.

Satish has worked with several renowned companies in India and abroad in leadership positions. This includes his stints as CTO of Global Enterprise with Reliance Communications, SVP and CTO at Vodafone Business Services, and Lead Mobile & Connectivity Partnership at Meta by Facebook. With over 30 years of industry experience, Satish is set to lead Chargeup in not only building meaningful collaborations but also accelerating the company’s rate of growth. 

The company recently raised pre-series A1 funding and is looking at expanding its services to 20 new cities and power over 50,000 drivers. Chargeup is also forging high-value partnerships with leading enterprises in their respective domains and building advanced climate-tech solutions to support the Government of India’s plans in the sustainable mobility arena. 

Redseer Strategy Consultants Southeast Asia arm expands to Indonesia

Redseer Strategy Consultants, a strategy consulting firm, has announced the opening of its office in Indonesia. The new office in Jakarta will enable the company to meet the growing demand for quality strategic advice and consulting services in the region. 

According to a statement by the company, Redseer Strategy Consultants' new office in Indonesia aims to serve the region's strong demand for digital transformation and strategic advice. The move into Indonesia is expected to help the firm establish stronger relationships with local businesses and contribute to the growth of the country's economy.  

Joom enters India, begins platform operations for SMEs and exporters

Joom, an European marketplace, has launched its operations in India. Recently, a team from the company visited eight Indian cities—including New Delhi, Indore, Roorkie, Ludhiana, Jaipur, Mumbai, and Surat—to present cross-border trade opportunities to local businesses.

Following the meetings, more than 350 merchants joined the platform, which offers space to the most popular categories—fashion, jewellery, crystal healing, health and beauty, health supplements, skin care, hair care, and women’s fashion and accessories.

Headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal, Joom was founded in 2016 in Riga, Latvia. The company partners with major Asian and European Union merchants and takes their products to customers worldwide. 

Knorish launches Funnels GPT for content creators

Creator monetisation platform Knorish has launched AI-powered FunnelsGPT, which is specially designed for content creators, helping them in creating better and quicker content and copy for social media, landing pages or online ads.

Knorish is building a platform for creator monetisation through a sales funnel for online courses, webinars and memberships, said the company.

In October 2022, the startup raised a pre-series A extension round from Silverneedle Ventures and other marquee investors.

With the power of AI, Funnels GPT can scour through millions of content pieces and give outstanding responses in seconds. With all-natural language processing tools and other GPTs, the tool is not meant for original academic research. It supports course creators to write better content for marketing and promoting their coaching businesses online.

Industry veteran and former top executive of Vodafone, Kavita Nair, joins Skewb Analytics as Strategic Advisor

Skewb Analytics, an AI powered marketing analytics startup, has appointed industry veteran Kavita Nair as its Strategic Advisor. Kavita will work closely with the leadership team to provide guidance on product enhancements, go-to-market strategy and organisational growth.

Founded in 2022 by Sandeep Pandey, Snigdha Gupta and Shubham Chhajed), Skewb Analytics aims to revolutionise marketing analytics with SaaS-based services and agile methodologies. Its highly evolved marketing analytics solution is designed to solve the age-old problem of measuring marketing effectiveness, especially in today’s digital-first world.

Slang Labs launches CONVA – a multilingual Voice Search Assistant for e-commerce applications

Slang Labs, a Google-backed startup from Bengaluru, has launched CONVA, a full-stack solution that provides smart and highly accurate multilingual voice search capabilities inside e-commerce apps.

CONVA is available as a simple SDK (Software Development Kit) that can be integrated into existing e-commerce apps in less than 30 minutes without developers needing any knowledge of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural language processing (NLP), Text-to-Speech (TTS) and other advanced voice tech stack concepts.

CONVA-powered voice search comprehends mixed-code (multiple languages in one sentence) utterances, enabling consumers to speak naturally in their own language in order to search for products and information inside e-commerce mobile and web apps - while allowing the brand to maintain its app backend in only one language i.e. English.

Investment platforms Jiraaf crosses Rs 1000 Cr in investments

Jiraaf, a high-yield alternative investment platform in India claims to have recorded more than 15 times growth and deployed more than Rs 1,000 crore in investments as of January 2023. Jiraaf is the first horizontal fixed-income platform enabling digital participation from investors with a minimum investment size of Rs 1 lakh. Investors can earn yields ranging from 8% to 20% for a period of 30 days to 3 years.

Founded in September 2021 by Vineet Agrawal and Saurav Ghosh, Jiraaf has emerged as a reliable fintech platform for alternative fixed-income opportunities repaying Rs 550 cr with zero defaults or delays.

Pankaj Gupta joins Quickplay as Head of Solutions Engineering, APAC and MVPD

Pankaj Gupta has joined Quickplay as Head of Solutions Engineering, APAC and MVPD.

Gupta, who joins Quickplay after three years with Synamedia, will leverage his expertise in helping content distributors shape and build video delivery systems as he spearheads go-to-market strategies in the APAC and India markets for Quickplay’s industry-first, cloud-native OTT platform.

Previously he was head of sales and business development/video cloud product SME during a five-year career with Cisco that included execution of the world’s first hybrid video cloud platform deal. Gupta also was CTO for Airtel International’s direct-to-home project and general manager and head of DTH NOC for Airtel India.

Meddo Health invests Rs 25 Cr to forays into aesthetic dermatology with the launch of Uncover in India

Meddo Health has launched oUncover, a line of aesthetic dermatology services, in India. It is commencing operations from Delhi/NCR (Gurugram) and plans to target both tier-I and tier-II cities with Uncover. Simultaneously, the company is looking to open its centers in Jaipur, Panipat, Jalandhar, and projects to generate over Rs 200 crore annualized revenue in the next two years.

Uncover's services are now available at its centers and at the comfort of people’s home through the brand's website.

BeatO reports more than 20x growth in its female users in the last 5 years

Of its 2 million total user base, BeatO, a comprehensive digital care platform for controlling and reversing diabetes, has observed 20 times growth in the number of female users in the last five years. 

The digital care platform has positively impacted the lives of over 6 lakh women. 9% of these women belong to the age group of 18 to 25 years, followed by 16% in the age group of 26 to 35 years, 18% from 36-45 years, the largest segment of 25% are in 46 to 55 years age group, 19% are 56-65 years and remaining 13% are from over 65 years age group.

Only 40% BeatO’s female users  are from metros whereas the majority share of 60% belong to tier II, III, IV and beyond.

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