Blume Ventures, others back cloud startup Minjar

By Dearton Thomas Hector

  • 06 Jul 2017

Bengaluru- and US-based Minjar Cloud Solutions Pvt. Ltd that operates a cloud computing platform has raised an undisclosed amount in its pre-Series A funding round led by Blume Ventures, a top executive told VCCircle.

Others who participated in the round include Contrarian Capital India Partners and Emergent Ventures India as well as individual investors Pallav Nadhani, founder and chief executive of FusionCharts; Ashish Gupta, co-founder of Helion Ventures; Sharad Sharma of iSPIRT and Indus Khaitan of Sirion Labs.

The firm will use the funds to expand its US operations, said co-founder and chief executive Vijay Rayapati.

The development was first reported by The Times of India.

The startup was founded by Rayapati, Anand and Aparna Sharma in 2012. Rayapati is an alumnus of Osmania University while Anand is a graduate of Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. Sharma is an alumnus of Indian Institute of Management Bangalore.

Before starting up, Rayapati was chief technology officer of social technology firm Kuliza. Anand and Sharma also previously worked at Kuliza.

The firm provides a cloud platform that helps companies manage operations. It has around 90 employees.

Minjar clocked revenues of around $2.1 million in calendar year 2016, said Rayapati.

In March last year, it raised $900,000 in seed funding from Silicon Valley-based Emergent Ventures.

In January this year, Cloud-based solutions provider SecurAX Tech Solutions (I) Pvt. Ltd secured an undisclosed amount of funding from early-stage investor Axilor Ventures, Parampara Early Stage Opportunities Fund and a clutch of angel investors.

In December last year, Pi Datacenters Pvt. Ltd, which provides cloud services, raised Rs 154 crore ($23 million) from Epsilon Venture Partners and an Australian private equity group in a Series A round of funding.

Another player in the field is Capillary Technologies, which provides cloud-based software solutions to retailers. In September last year, it secured $6 million (around Rs 40 crore) from venture debt firm InnoVen Capital. Capillary, which has raised over $80 million over the past few years, is also funded by Warburg Pincus, Sequoia Capital and Norwest Venture Partners. In October last year, it acquired e-commerce technology solutions and services provider Sellerworx Online Service Pvt. Ltd.