Home interior materials startup Mistry.Store on Wednesday said it has secured seed funding of $2 million (around Rs 16 crore) led by early-stage investment firm Omidyar Network India.
The round also saw participation from Waveform VC and Bharat Founders Fund, with angel investors including OYO’s Maninder Gulati, Vasant Sridhar (Co-founder of OfBusiness), Rohit Kapoor (CEO of Swiggy) and Sumer Juneja (Managing Partner at SoftBank), among others.
The platform will deploy the fresh proceeds to build a tech-enabled solution for home interior professionals and their homeowner customers.
Founded by Vaibhav Poddar and Bhanu Mahajan in 2022, Mistry.Store is a platform that helps simplify building material purchases like wood, plumbing, paints, hardware and electricals, among others, for homeowners.
“We at Mistry.Store are aiming to simplify the material purchasing journey which is typically led by home interior professionals. While this market is highly organized in western countries, no significant player has emerged yet in the India market, owing to local market dynamics,” said Poddar.
“The home building material market in India continues to be fraught with inefficiencies, inflated pricing and severe opacity for end consumers. By addressing these concerns and by empowering the small businesses and independent professionals who are at the heart of the industry, Mistry.store aims to organise this large fragmented market through technology,” said Abhirup Sarkar of Omidyar Network India.
Omidyar Network India, part of the larger Omidyar Group, makes investments in early-stage enterprises in sectors such as emerging technology, education, and financial inclusion.
Digital marketing solutions startup Intellemo has secured seed capital of over Rs 3 crore (around $361,000) led by Inflection Point Ventures.
The round also saw participation from CRED’s founder Kunal Shah, Badri Ecofibers’ founder Amit Gupta and others.
The startup will use the fresh funds to expand the tech team and scaling video ads tech.
Intellemo was founded by Saurabh Gupta, Tusha Agarwal and Shivam Gupta. The platform provides instant marketing campaigns to make it super easy to run marketing for businesses. The user can select the industry, specify the goals along with their business information, and then get recommendations of ad posts that are ready to deploy within minutes.
New startups and businesses need marketing solutions that are easy to understand, quick to deploy and perform at par with bigger companies with resources. But current solutions are not capable of meeting this upcoming demand at scale. It can only be satisfied if readymade campaigns are crafted beforehand, sold as a product in an online e-commerce marketplace and delivered instantly on demand,” said Saurabh Gupta, Founder and CEO at Intellemo.
“Intemello is solving this by taking the SaaS route as it becomes cost friendly for small and medium businesses. Companies who have smaller budgets allocated to marketing and ads can now utilise a SaaS service without feeling the extra pressure. As more SMEs go digital, we see this market growing and exploding,” said Mitesh Shah, Co-founder at Inflection Point Ventures.
Launched by Mittal, Vinay Bansal and Mitesh Shah, IPV had invested Rs 215 crore in 51 startups in 2021. BharatPe emerged as a multi-bagger giving over 80folds returns to IPV which it exited to BharatPe’s returning investor Coatue Management who led the $108 million Series D round in the fintech unicorn last year.
IPV first invested in BharatPe in 2018 and has completed a full exit.