Bangalore-based startup Insieve has secured funding, led by Ojas Venture Partners, with participation from Blume Ventures as well.
Although the deal amount has not been disclosed, Ojas typically makes an initial investment of $250,000-$1.5 million, with follow-on rounds cumulating to a maximum of $3 million per company.
Insieve is an intelligent sharing network that understands what one shares (within your network) and recommends content based on one’s reading behaviour (as well as from the network).
The capital raised will be used for product round-up (right now, it is in beta stage) and for developing go-to-market strategy. Insieve will also focus on hiring new talents.
Post-investment, Gautam Balijepalli and Rajesh Srivathsa of Ojas will join the company’s board while Karthik Reddy of Blume Ventures will join as an observer.
Talking about the investment, Balijepalli, Partner at Ojas, said, “We known the team for more than a year and we have been tracking their progress. All of us deal with the problem of information overload and that is a fairly large problem with a global market. Insieve's solution of helping one find relevant information, and relevant information find you is very unique. But the team has really been successful in tracking complex problem and coming up with a solution with the necessary expertise.â€
Insieve was set up in December 2011 by Venkatesh Sharma and Bharath Mohan . Sharma, an alumnus of the University of Mysore, previously worked with companies like Tata Infotech, Symantec, NetApp, Agami Systems, HiveFire and Sonoa Systems Inc. Mohan is a passout from the University of Mysore and Indian Institute of Science, and worked for CastBridge Inc, Google and HighFive.
They also co-founded Dhiti (a content discovery engine for publishers; Dhiti’s widgets for WordPress, Blogger, Drupal and Joomla automatically suggest relevant articles to read on every page), Nuggetize (a meta-search engine that organises facts in documents obtained from top search results into relevant topics and categories) and Intweetion (it converts one’s Twitter stream into a research library; Intweetion analyses the articles coming down one’s Twitter stream and unearths interesting concepts and facts among them – all organised for easy browsing and discovery).
This is Ojas’ fourth investment in the past 12 months. Earlier, it had invested in the two-year-old startup BrizzTV Media Lab Pvt Ltd, a Bangalore-based company which develops digital media platform to bring Web content onto the television screen, and also funded Bangalore-based digital radio startup Venturenet Partners and US-based social gaming startupPlay140.