AI-focused startup Mad Street Den bags $30 mn

By Malvika Maloo

  • 18 Jan 2023
Credit: 123RF.com

Enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) startup Mad Street Den has raised $30 million in its Series C round, led by Avatar Growth Capital, with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital and Alpha Wave Global (formerly known as Falcon Edge Capital). 

The company will use the capital to expand its offerings across industries, as it doubles down on scaling the business across verticals. 

The company was founded in 2016 by Ashwini Asokan and Anand Chandrasekaran, with the launch of its artificial intelligence platform Vue.ai, focusing on the retail segment. Since then, the company has forayed into new verticals like that of finance, insurance, healthcare, pharma, and logistics through its AI stack Blox. 

The automated platform helps in scale of operation, speed, accuracy, and significant cost savings, while improving return on investment of its customers by leveraging data. 

“At Mad Street Den, we’ve gone step by step to build an AI platform, taking a vertical-first approach into retail and then scaling that horizontally across several industries and use cases,” said Ashwini Asokan, chief executive and founder, Mad Street Den. 

The company is headquartered in California with a presence in Chennai. 

“At MSD, we’ve gone step by step of building an AI platform, taking a vertical-first approach into retail and then scaling that horizontally across several industries and use cases,” said Ashwini Asokan, chief executive and founder, Mad Street Den. 

 
In November 2022, the startup bought Inturn, a New York-based enterprise solution that helps retailers monetize excess inventory, for an undisclosed amount.  

“Enterprises today need to not only do things faster, automate processes and workflows but also make decisions faster,” said Abhay Havaldar, Founder and Managing Partner, Avatar Growth Capital. 

“Blox’s ability to solve business problems across industries, use cases while maintaining efficacy at scale and low cost is highly differentiated,” he added.  

Mad Street Den had last raised $17 million in its Series B round of funding) led by Alpha Wave in 2019. It also counts Tokyo-based independent venture capital fund Global Brain as its investor.  

Avatar Growth Capital has firms like customer engagement platform Blueshift, cloud solutions firm CoreStack, Contract Management Software Sirion Labs in its portfolio.