Retail intelligence platform Vue.ai has raised $17 million (around Rs 119 crore at the current exchange rate) in a Series B round of funding led by a new investor, New York-based hedge fund Falcon Edge Capital.
Vue.ai said in a statement that existing investors Sequoia Capital India and KDDI Open Innovation Fund 2, which is managed by Tokyo-based independent venture capital fund Global Brain, had also contributed.
The fresh capital will be used to ramp up Vue.ai’s team, deliver on its product roadmap and expand its customer base that already includes global retailers such as US firm Macy's and Tata Cliq, part of Indian conglomerate Tata group.
Vue.ai was launched in 2016 by Ashwini Asokan and Anand Chandrasekaran as the first artificial intelligence platform from its parent company, Mad Street Den Systems Pvt. Ltd.
Vue.ai combines its seven different products -- VueTag, VueCommerce, VueModel, VueStyle, VueFind, VueMail and VueStudio -- to offer retailers a unified system used as a ‘neural network for retail’ that leverages image recognition and data science to extract retail catalogue data, analyse it with user behaviour and help retailers make faster decisions.
“Brands are shifting to designing worlds that consumers want to be a part of and that has to integrate with the new ways people shop," said Asokan, co-founder and chief executive of Vue.ai.
The company, which is headquartered in California with offices in Chennai, has so far raised $27.5 million taking into account the latest infusion.
Vue.ai had secured an undisclosed amount in fresh funding from KDDI in September last year.
Before that, it had raised an undisclosed amount in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital India and existing investors Exfinity Venture Partners and GrowX Ventures in 2016. The firm had raised $1.5 million (about Rs 9 crore) in seed funding in January 2015 from Exfinity Venture Partners and GrowX Ventures.
Investor
Falcon Edge Capital was founded in 2012 by Richard Gerson, along with Navroz D Udwadia and Ryan Khoury. It manages more than $2 billion in assets globally.
In January, VCCircle reported that the hedge fund was raising money for an India-focussed investment vehicle.
Falcon Edge Capital has made at least half-a-dozen investments in India. According to VCCEdge, the data research platform of Mosaic Digital, Falcon Edge Capital’s disclosed India investments total more than $400 million.
This is spread across companies such as ride-hailing unicorn Ola, classifieds portal Quikr, digital lender OfBusiness, non-banking financial company JM Financial Credit Solutions, real estate portal Housing.com, mobile payments firm Mswipe and news aggregator Dailyhunt.